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Marcos Díaz-Gay: Why Do People Who Have Never Smoked Still Develop Lung Cancer?
Jul 8, 2025, 10:27

Marcos Díaz-Gay: Why Do People Who Have Never Smoked Still Develop Lung Cancer?

Marcos Díaz-Gay, Junior Group Leader at CNIO – Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, shared on LinkedIn:

“Why do people who have never smoked still develop lung cancer? In our latest work, just published in Nature Magazine, we analyzed 871 tumors from never smokers across 28 regions worldwide to trace the genomic fingerprints of the mutational processes driving these cancers.

We found that patients living in regions with high levels of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) have a higher overall burden of somatic mutations, particularly related to specific mutational signatures, TP53 alterations, and shorter telomeres.

This study is part of the international Sherlock-Lung project, led by Maria Teresa Landi and Tongwu Zhang at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and was also co-supervised by Ludmil B. Alexandrov at UC San Diego. I’m proud to have co-led this study as a postdoctoral researcher and, subsequently, as the leader of the Digital Genomics group at the CNIO – Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, with support from the State Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence.

Special thanks to Pilar Gallego García from my team, also collaborating on the study, and to Laura Rodriguez Porras, for the beautiful illustration!

This project builds on our broader efforts to understand how environmental exposures shape cancer genomes, including our recent study linking colorectal cancer in young adults to a bacterial toxin.

Check out our study in Nature.”

Marcos Díaz-Gay

Title: The mutagenic forces shaping the genomes of lung cancer in never smokers

Authors: Marcos Díaz-Gay, Tongwu Zhang, Phuc H. Hoang, Charles Leduc, Marina K. Baine, William D. Travis, Lynette M. Sholl, Philippe Joubert, Azhar Khandekar, Wei Zhao, Christopher D. Steele, Burçak Otlu, Shuvro P. Nandi, Raviteja Vangara, Erik N. Bergstrom, Mariya Kazachkova, Oriol Pich, Charles Swanton, Chao Agnes Hsiung, I-Shou Chang, Maria Pik Wong, Kin Chung Leung, Jian Sang, John P. McElderry, Caleb Hartman, Frank J. Colón-Matos, Mona Miraftab, Monjoy Saha, Olivia W. Lee, Kristine M. Jones, Pilar Gallego-García, Yang Yang, Xiaoming Zhong, Eric S. Edell, Jacobo Martínez Santamaría, Matthew B. Schabath, Sai S. Yendamuri, Marta Manczuk, Jolanta Lissowska, Beata Świątkowska, Anush Mukeria, Oxana Shangina, David Zaridze, Ivana Holcatova, Dana Mates, Sasa Milosavljevic, Millica Kontic, Yohan Bossé, Bonnie E. Gould Rothberg, David C. Christiani, Valerie Gaborieau, Paul Brennan, Geoffrey Liu, Paul Hofman, Lixing Yang, Martin A. Nowak, Jianxin Shi, Nathaniel Rothman, David C. Wedge, Robert Homer, Soo-Ryum Yang, Angela C. Pesatori, Dario Consonni, Qing Lan, Bin Zhu, Stephen J. Chanock, Jiyeon Choi, Ludmil B. Alexandrov & Maria Teresa Landi

Marcos Díaz-Gay

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