CRUK Career Development Fellow

The number and characteristics of each type of blood cells are frequently used in clinical practice and deviations outside the normal ranges can be indicative of a wide array of blood pathologies. It is becoming increasingly clear that genetic changes acquired throughout life play an important role in initiation of blood disorders including blood cancers.

In the last few years, DNA sequencing technologies have been developed that allow the identification of every genetic change in a given cancer sample, promising a new harvest of cancer genes. However, many of the identified genes were not previously implicated in blood formation and there is a real need to investigate the biology and potential therapeutic aspects of these genes. The aim of the group is to bridge this knowledge gap by providing a method in a relevant model organism (zebrafish, Danio rerio) that will allow the dissection of the role of the cancer genes with a hitherto unknown function and to determine their hierarchical position in the regulatory networks that underlie haematopoiesis. This will be achieved by pursuing two main objectives:

First, a high-throughput screen in zebrafish to dissect the functional role of novel cancer genes, implicated in myelodysplasia and myeloproliferative neoplasms, in haematopoiesis. This effort will define the function of novel cancer genes in blood cell formation by a morpholino knock-down approach in zebrafish.

If successful, this research will be the major first step towards systematic, high-throughput functional characterisation of newly identified genes implicated in haematopoietic malignancies in a relevant in vivo model system and will explore the realms of acquired and function-modifying genetic variants.