Department Head
Oslo University Hospital, Norway
Dr. Leonardo A. Meza-Zepeda is the Head of the Department of Core Facilities at the Institute for Cancer Research at Oslo University Hospital. Meza-Zepeda received his degree in Biochemistry in Chile and later a Ph.D. in Cancer Genomics from the University of Oslo. His research has focused on understanding cancer genome biology in soft tissue and bone tumours, with particular emphasis on identifying and characterising somatic changes. In the last few years, he has extensively used high-throughput sequencing technologies to characterise genomic and transcriptomic changes across different cancer types and to use blood as a liquid biopsy to detect and monitor circulating tumour DNA in cancer patients. Meza-Zepeda has been instrumental in developing high-throughput genomic analysis in Norway, from high-throughput sequencing of cancer samples to single-cell and spatial multi-omics. He has led the cancer sequencing technology platform for the Norwegian Cancer Genomics Consortium (NCGC) and is a principal investigator of the Norwegian Consortium for Sequencing and Personalised Medicine (NorSeq), which runs the national platform for high-throughput sequencing. Meza-Zepeda is also actively implementing advanced precision diagnostics in Norway to stratify cancer patients for clinical trials.
