Jamie Blundell

Delighted to share our latest on longitudinal methylation dynamics preceding cancer. Epigenetic signs of AML appear in blood DECADES before Dx.
👉 Early cancer detection
👉 Methylation drivers
👉 Epimutation rates
👉 CpG lineage tracing

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Drosophila Genetic Database The Drosophila Genetic Database, FlyBase, is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden termination of the FlyBase NIH grant, which includes salaries for 5 literature curators based at the University ...

Flybase lost all of the NIH support overnight - it is a disaster for the community. Please consider donating. I just did! www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

From Likelihood to Fitness: Improving Variant Effect Prediction in Protein and Genome Language Models Generative models trained on natural sequences are increasingly used to predict the effects of genetic variation, enabling progress in therapeutic design, disease risk prediction, and synthetic biolog...

New preprint in collaboration with @paulinanunezv.bsky.social supervised by @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social and Mafalda Dias – we propose a simple approach to improving zero-shot variant effect prediction in pre-existing protein and genome language models: 🧶 1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨With some delay, we're excited to announce that our proposal for a MSCA Doctoral Network on Evolutionary Medical Genomics (EvoMG-DN) got funded! 🎉

🧬 14 labs and 2 companies across 7 European countries will be coordinated by the EvoMG Joint Program at @crg.eu & @upf.edu.

europa.eu/!NNq63m

I just wanted to let you know that, having been encouraged by many and received over four times the number of nominations required, I announced today that I am throwing my hat into the ring for the election of the next Chancellor of the University of Cambridge...
1 of 2

Delighted to share a major update on our work investigating age-related deceleration in clonal haematopoiesis.

Takehome: Widespread and substantial deceleration in fitness with age!

Amazing effort by PhD student Hamish MacGregor 💪

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is beautiful work — congrats to all the authors 👏

Join the Early Cancer Institute for talks from Professor Jamie Blundell and Dr Daniel Muñoz Espín, on their research into cancer evolution and aging! @cambridgefestival.bsky.social

📅 Tues 25 March
⏰ 6-8pm
📍 St John's College Old Divinity School, CB2 1TP
Register ➡️ zurl.co/7NTWz

🔥 New Fraticelli lab publication🔥

“Pre-existing stem cell heterogeneity dictates clonal responses to the acquisition of leukemia driver mutations”

Now at Cell Stem Cell, with two new figures, in vivo, and sequential mutagenesis data.

Performed with the support of Cris Cancer and @erc.europa.eu

We are excited to announce a new faculty position here in Cambridge, for researchers in computational and/or theoretical biology, based jointly in Genetics and Mathematics. Come and join us! Happy to answer questions about research, teaching and working here. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50414/

Legitmately thrilled to share our latest work, in which @fernpizza.bsky.social solved an experimental challenge in plasmid biology as old as the field: measuring how plasmids compete and evolve within individual cells!

Want to work in one of the most dynamic places in mathematical biology - in one of the oldest universities in the world - great colleagues, great science.

Thank you Vijay!

Single-cell DNA sequencing reveals pervasive positive selection throughout preleukemic evolution The representation of driver mutations in preleukemic HSCs provides a window into the somatic evolution that precedes AML. Here, Poon et al. isolate pHSCs from the bone marrow of 16 patients with AML ...

Delighted to share our latest work exploring levels of selection operating during pre-cancerous evolution usng single-cell DNA sequencing of HSCs led by the outstanding Gladys Poon
www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

This idea -- Somatic variants as an in vivo saturation mutagenesis screen — opens up so many opportunities too. # cells >> # people, so you get more statistical power and you preserve cell context (i.e. specific to T-cells here). They have opened up the world of somatic, tissue specific GWAS…

Naturally occurring T cell mutations enhance engineered T cell therapies - Nature A study examines the effects of mutations that occur naturally in T cell cancers, reporting that such mutations can potentially be exploited to increase the potency of T cell therapies.

For me it is "Naturally occurring T cell mutations enhance engineered T cell therapies"

The idea is so simple: use naturally occurring somatic mutations as an in vivo screen. Evolution finds mutations that improve T-cell persistence and survival which would not have been discovered with CRISPR.

Extremely pleased to share our new work in collaboration with the @bruskolab.bsky.social lab, where we leveraged one of the largest TCRbeta sequencing datasets to identify T1D-associated TCR-based signatures. Paper link and 🧵 are below. Incredible work led by @puneet021192.bsky.social.

Does my mutation have the same impact as yours? Population genetics 🤠 🥸 🤓 🤡 meets single cell CRISPRi ⚡ ! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Led by Claudia Feng, Oliver Stegle, Britta Velten, @sangerinstitute.bsky.social .

Characterizing the evolutionary dynamics of cancer proliferation in single-cell clones with SPRINTER - Nature Genetics Single-cell Proliferation Rate Inference in Non-homogeneous Tumors through Evolutionary Routes (SPRINTER) allows users to infer proliferation rates of individual clones within a tumor from single-cell...

🚨So proud to present the first study from our @ccg-ucl.bsky.social group together with @charlesswanton.bsky.social @NnennayaKanu and led by @ojlucas.bsky.social with key collaboration @sophie-ward.bsky.social and fundamental support @rijazaidi.bsky.social @abibunkum.bsky.social & others

Out now👇
🧵👇

Landmark moment for early cancer detection 🤩👏👏👏

V interesting idea 👇

TIRTL-seq: Deep, quantitative, and affordable paired TCR repertoire sequencing α/β T cells are key players in adaptive immunity. The specificity of T cells is determined by the sequences of the hypervariable T cell receptor (TCR) α and β chains. Although bulk TCR sequencing offe...

We keep improving TIRTL-seq, see the updated preprint (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)! New additions include: a manual 96-well protocol, code and raw data now available, and successful in vitro validation of EBV and SARS-CoV-2 TCRs.

The dawn of a new medicine: Researchers use the theory of evolution to fight cancer The world’s first joint research program in evolutionary medical genomics has been launched in Barcelona, under the direction of biologist Manuel Irimia

Big 🧬 news this week: we have launched the first Joint Program on Evolutionary Medical Genomics. Spearheaded by @mirimiam.bsky.social, Barcelona researchers will study and exploit the vast genomic diversity of life on Earth to enhance precision medicine. Full story in @elpais.com

Amazing work and a technology which opens up so many research directions. Congratulations @imartincorena.bsky.social and team!

In vivo dendritic cell reprogramming for cancer immunotherapy Immunotherapy can lead to long-term survival for some cancer patients, yet generalized success has been hampered by insufficient antigen presentation and exclusion of immunogenic cells from the tumor ...

Before I go to bed let me post an amazing paper by Filipe Pereira’s group (Ervin Ascic et al) for your enjoyment. I think this is a likely fundamental breakthrough in cancer immunotherapy: personalized, yet generic and probably pan-cancer. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...