Mission and Goals
Data science and AI for cancer research
The Institute for Computational Cancer Biology (ICCB) at the University Hospital Cologne was founded in 2022 to advance cancer research through computational methods and to train and educate the next generation of computational cancer scientists.
We are part of the Cancer Research Center Cologne Essen (CCCE) funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Our mission is to develop bespoke statistical methods, machine learning approaches, algorithms and models to decipher tumour heterogeneity and cancer evolution and improve our understanding of the wealth of genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic and imaging data collected in cancer research.
Want to know more?
| ▶ News | ▶ Work with us |
About us
Events
February 20, 2026 - 1pm, Zoom
ICCB Seminar Series on Computational Cancer Biology & Epi-Club - Professor Ana Pombo
Ana will talk about Spatial 3D Genomics: from mammalian chromosome structure to ecological microbiota relationships
About the speaker
Ana Pombo studied Biochemistry at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Afterwards, she obtained her PhD from the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, where she described transcription factories in the mammalian nucleus. She stayed as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow before starting her own group at the Imperial College London in 2000. In 2013, Pombo moved her lab to Berlin, becoming a senior group leader at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin-Buch with the focus on "Epigenetic Regulation and Chromatin Architecture". Now she is a research professor in the Department of Biology at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore. Ana is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). Her work was awarded with the Leibniz Prize in 2025.
About us
News
June 19, 2026
Successful Summer Retreat in Jünkerath
This year's summer lab retreat brought us again to the beautiful Glaadter Hütte in Jünkerath.
We used the inspiring atmosphere of the Eifel to continue our successful hackathon event from last winter, developing new innovative ideas, prototyping new computational tools, and tackling challenging scientific questions.
Beyond the coding and grant writing sessions, there was plenty of time for scientific discussions, networking, and some outdoor group activities.
March 16, 2026
SC-BIG our Bayesian model for somatic SNV calling in single-cell DNA sequencing is now available on bioRxiv
Despite technological advances, scDNA-seq remains noisy and is affected by amplification biases and allelic dropouts. SC-BIG leverages bulk sequencing data from a representative tumor sample to improve SNV detection by propagating uncertainty across multiple biological parameters, including copy number alterations, sample purity, and SNV clonality.
In a first step, the cancer cell fraction (CCF) of a SNV is jointly estimated from bulk and single-cell data. The CCF in turn then acts as a prior in the second inference step to calculate per-cell posterior probabilities for the presence of the SNV.
SC-BIG is available for use on GitHub.
Sponsors and Partners
Funder
University Hospital and University of Cologne
Funder
Cancer Research Center Cologne Essen (CCCE)
funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Strategic partner
Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD)
funded by the German Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR).
