Calum Gabbutt

Cancer is an evolutionary disease, but does knowing a cancer’s evolutionary past help predict its future? Out today in @Nature, we learnt the evolution of 2000 lymphoid cancers and found it was highly correlated with clinical outcomes! (1/7, link below)

Big thanks to @PBousquets, @dmallo_phylo, @trevoragraham, @cmaley, Heather Grant and Darryl Shibata

PHYFUM is therefore a low-cost method to uncover evolution of healthy glandular tissues, and we hope to use the method to develop evolutionary biomarkers of neoplastic progression.

How do epithelial stem cells in our intestine evolve over our lifetime? In our new pre-print, @PBousquets and team used fluctuating methylation barcodes to find out!

@SciKit_G Congratulations Kit! Very well deserved

I'm excited to be starting at a Schmidt Science Fellow - I'll be applying my maths background in genomics to characterize the role of chromosomal instabilities in cancer evolution. Do reach out if you're interested in quantitative tools for single-cell and longitudinal genomics!

Registration is free: forms.gle/jSxB1TdPURRaBH… To submit an abstract for a short presentation, please enter it during the registration process and submit by Fri 10th April at 5pm. Registration will remain open after the 10th, but abstracts will no longer be accepted.

If you're interested in integrating theory and data to better understand how cancers evolve, register for the 2nd CANPOP meeting! Featuring a keynote talk from Martin Taylor (@mst_paralogue) and a series of selected short talks, what better way to spend a Monday afternoon?

In 1999, Tom Maniatis discovered something remarkable: neurons achieve self-avoidance via stochastic methylation of the protocadherin gene cluster. We've just discovered this locus is an evolvable in-vivo barcode across the human tissues: biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… 🧵

If you’re interested in machine learning and mathematical modelling, we’re recruiting a PhD student to develop new methods for studying cancer evolution at @ImperialImmuno. Link below.

An incredible opportunity for early career researchers - Imperial's Faculty of Medicine is hiring 20 Assistant Professors!

@mathoncbro @Nature Thanks Jeffrey!

@CalumGabbutt @Nature Fantastic work Calum! This is really really neat!

Cancer is an evolutionary disease, but does knowing a cancer’s evolutionary past help predict its future? Out today in @Nature, we learnt the evolution of 2000 lymphoid cancers and found it was highly correlated with clinical outcomes! (1/7, link below)

@AlejoFraticelli @Nature Thanks Alejo, it looks to be an excellent meeting!

@CalumGabbutt @Nature Congrats!!! Looking forward to your presentation next week at the EMBO lineage tracing meeting!!!

@gushamilton @Nature Also, I think you're being overcharged! I believe we pay ~£200 per sample.

@gushamilton @Nature All the bead array data in the study was previously published! One of the advantage of fCpGs is that they "tick" much more rapidly than SNVs, so rather than having to sequence the whole genome, you can target just those ~1,000 sites. This makes a targeted assay possible.

This was a massively collaborative project and it was a pleasure to work with such amazing researchers, but particular thanks to @Marti_DF, @BEpigenomics and @trevoragraham. (7/7)

Finally, fCpGs record clonal dynamics over time. In two patients with Richter transformation (RT), the emergence of an altered phenotype with dismal outcomes, we inferred that the RT clone diverged from the non-RT lineage over 30 years prior to its clinical manifestation! (6/7)