# Christina Curtis

Source: https://onco.cc/people/christina-curtis/  
OnCo record `christina-curtis` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Showed that colorectal cancers grow as a 'Big Bang' and that metastasis can be seeded years before diagnosis.

## Summary

Christina Curtis developed the Big Bang model showing that colorectal tumours acquire their intratumour heterogeneity early and grow without stringent selection, and used computational modelling of paired primary-metastasis genomes to show that metastatic seeding often occurs years before the primary tumour is detected. She co-led METABRIC and her laboratory now studies how germline immunogenetics shapes somatic tumour evolution.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-10
- Tags: tumour-evolution; computational; genomics
- Role: Professor of Medicine, Genetics and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University
- Specialisms: Tumour evolution; Computational cancer biology; Metastasis timing; Breast cancer genomics

## Sources

- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Curtis%20C%5BAuthor%5D%20tumor%20evolution

## Connected records

- cancers: [Colorectal cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/colorectal/), [HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/breast-hr-positive/)
- technologies: [Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencing](https://onco.cc/technologies/wes-wgs/)
- institutions: [Stanford Health Care / Stanford Cancer Institute](https://onco.cc/institutions/stanford/)
- key papers: [Gerlinger: a single biopsy misses most of the mutations in a kidney tumour](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-gerlinger-intratumour-heterogeneity-nejm-2012/)
- journals: [Nature Genetics](https://onco.cc/journals/nature-genetics/)

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