Quantitative genetic and epigenetic lineage tracing of blood in the decades preceding leukaemia diagnosis

Tuesday, 23 June 2026, 9.30am to 10.30am

For our next talk, in the BDI/CHG (gen)omics Seminar series, we will be hearing from Prof. Jamie Blundell, Ursula Zoellner Professor of Cancer Research at the Early Cancer Institute at the University of Cambridge and a UKRI future leaders fellow. We’re delighted to host Jamie in what promises to be a great talk!

Date: Tuesday 23 June
Time: 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Talk title: Quantitative genetic and epigenetic lineage tracing of blood in the decades preceding leukaemia diagnosis
Location: Big Data Institute, Seminar Room 0

Abstract
Many human tissues are maintained by large numbers of long-lived stem cells. Positive and negative selection on somatic mutations that occur in these stem cells can drive rapid evolution in human tissues over timescales of years to decades with important implications for future cancer risk. Blood is an ideal system for gaining a quantitative understanding of these dynamics because it is easily sampled, less spatially structured relative to other tissues and genomically well characterised. Here I will describe work that exploits unique collections of serial blood samples from people destined to develop future blood cancers to reveal quantitative insights into this evolutionary process. By performing high resolution lineage tracing of genetic and epigenetic marks we can time the key driving events in the evolution of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia, estimate fitness effects of clones throughout the full disease trajectory, and characterise competition between clones. These data shed light on the evolutionary dynamics occurring in pre-cancerous stem cells and suggest that many aspects of the observed dynamics can be understood within a surprisingly simple framework of clonal evolution with competition

Bio
Jamie is the Ursula Zoellner Professor of Cancer Research at the Early Cancer Institute at the University of Cambridge and a UKRI future leaders fellow. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge before moving to Stanford to undertake postdoctoral research in quantitative biology with Daniel Fisher and Dmitri Petrov in which he developed new ways of measuring and clonal evolution. He established his lab in Cambridge in 2017 with a focus on the somatic evolution that occurs in healthy tissues as we age and how this evolution is altered at the earliest stages of cancer. The lab also has an active interest in quantitative immunology particularly in T-cell antigen recognition.

Speaker(s): Professor Jamie Blundell (University of Cambridge)

Series: BDI/CHG Genomics seminar

Venue: Big Data Institute - Lower Ground Seminar Room 0 - Lower Ground Seminar Room 0 Big Data Institute Old Road Campus Oxford Oxfordshire OX3 7LF United Kingdom

Department: Big Data Institute - NDPH (Unit)

Organiser: Sumeeta Maheshwari

Host: Prof Thomas Nichols

More info: