Maximilian Billmann
University of Bonn, University Hospital Bonn
Biography
Maximilian Billmann is an assistant professor for pharmacogenomics at the institute of human genetics of the University Hospital Bonn. He develops computational methods to learn how genes interact in networks to regulate cells in changing environments such as metabolic alterations or the presence of disease-associated genetic variants.
He has driven a team effort to generate a reference human Genetic Interaction Network (GIN) (Billmann et al. Cell 2026; Billmann et al., bioRxiv 2025). He developed methods to control confounding factors in large-scale CRISPR screening experiments and improve reproducibility of those data.
He previously completed his postdoctoral with Chad Myers at the University of Minnesota in collaboration with the Boone, Moffat and Andrews labs at the University of Toronto. He completed his Ph.D. in Heidelberg with Michael Boutros and Wolfgang Huber. In his independent work, he aims to better understand and utilize different types of perturbation data, improve data reproducibility and guide experimental efforts to maximize the information gain towards a DepMap that covers genetic, environmental and phenotypic complexity of a cancer cell.
Relevant Publications
- Quantitative analysis of genetic interactions in human cells from genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screensBillmann M., Costanzo M., Rahman M., et al., bioRxiv (2026).
- Global genetic interaction network of a human cell maps conserved principles and informs functional interpretation of gene co-essentiality profilesBillmann M., Costanzo M., Zhang X., et al., Cell (2026).
- Genetic suppression features ABHD18 as a Barth syndrome therapeutic targetMasud S. N., Srivastava A., Mero P., et al., Nature (2025).
- BaCoN (Balanced Correlation Network) improves prediction of gene bufferingRohde T., Demirtas T. Y., Süsser S., et al., Molecular Systems Biology (2025).
- Mitoferrin2 is a synthetic lethal target for chromosome 8p deleted cancersKrieg S., Rhode T., Rausch T., et al., Genome Medicine (2024).
- Reproducibility metrics for context-specific CRISPR screensBillmann M., Ward H.N., Aregger M., et al., Cell Systems (2023).
- A method for benchmarking genetic screens reveals a predominant mitochondrial biasRahman M., Billmann M., Costanzo M., et al., Molecular Systems Biology (2021).
- Systematic mapping of genetic interactions for de novo fatty acid synthesis identifies C12orf49 as a regulator of lipid metabolismAregger M., Lawson K., Billmann M., Costanzo M., et al., Nature Metabolism (2020).
- Widespread rewiring of genetic networks upon cancer signaling pathway activationBillmann M., Chaudhary V., ElMaghraby M., Fischer B., Boutros M., Cell Systems (2018).
- A map of directional genetic interactions in a metazoan cellFischer B., Sandmann T., Horn T., Billmann M., Chaudhary V., Huber W., Boutros M., eLife (2015).