Ignacio Vazquez-Garcia

2026 Early Career Investigator Grant

Massachusetts General Hospital

Project Summary
This project uses spatial genomics to uncover how chromosomal instability (CIN) drives immune escape and treatment resistance in ovarian cancer. By combining spatial transcriptomics and single-cell genome sequencing, we will build high-resolution maps of tumor evolution across space and time. We aim to identify where resistant clones emerge, how they interact with immune and stromal cells, and which features predict treatment failure. These findings will inform the development of spatial-genomic biomarkers to guide personalized therapy, anticipate resistance, and improve outcomes for patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer.

Bio
Ignacio Vazquez-Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, an Assistant Investigator in the Department of Pathology and the Krantz Family Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. His research focuses on data-driven approaches to understand cancer evolution and treatment response, combining AI/ML, single-cell genomics and cellular imaging with large clinical datasets and experimental models. He leads a research program that leverages multi-modal data to decode the molecular principles governing somatic evolution and immune surveillance, and to enable the discovery of biomarkers and therapeutic strategies that anticipate and overcome tumor progression.

Dr. Vazquez-Garcia’s research in ovarian cancer has helped pioneer single-cell approaches to study tumor evolution. This includes landmark studies elucidating how ongoing chromosomal instability impacts tumor progression, and uncovering mechanisms of immune escape in the ovarian cancer microenvironment linked to underlying mutational processes. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in computational oncology, working with Dr. Sohrab Shah at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Dr. Simon Tavaré at Columbia University. He holds an undergraduate degree in physics from Imperial College London, and a PhD in mathematical genomics and medicine from the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. His work has been honored with several awards including an AACR NextGen Star Award, a Wellcome Fellowship, the Sanger Early Career Innovation Award, and the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance Mentored Investigator Award, among others.