We are a small, diverse, and interdisciplinary team working at the intersection of epidemiology, genomics, and cancer biology and medicine.
Our work has three strands. First, we study the inherited or germline genetic basis of cancer development, with a particular interest in identifying susceptibility genes that are shared between cancers and their risk factors or across multiple cancer types. Second, we study the inherited or germline genetic basis of somatic driver mutation acquisition and clonal expansion, two steps that are fundamental to cancer initiation and pre-malignant progression. Third, we build multi-modal models to predict cancer risk that integrate data from germline genomics, circulating proteomics, and electronic health records and registries.
The aim of the first two strands is to identify targets, especially drug targets, for precision cancer prevention and early interception. The aim of the third strand is to enable next generation risk-stratification strategies for single- and multi-cancer screening and surveillance.
We leverage data from large, international cancer case-control consortia and population-based biobank cohorts. We make extensive use of genome-wide association data analyses, statistical, bioinformatic, and other computational and functional genomic tools, causal inference, and machine learning.
Our work is or has been funded by grants from UK Research and Innovation, Blood Cancer United of the US, Blood Cancer UK, Cancer Research UK, and the US National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute.
We have an unwavering commitment to sharing all data that we generate with the wider scientific community, our research outputs are often highly cited, we have ongoing collaborations with investigators across multiple continents, including in the developing world, and maintain a strong commitment to public engagement.
We are based at the Early Cancer Institute in the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge Biomedical Campus.