Swanton lab

Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory

We are an interdisciplinary lab bringing together functional cell biology with cancer bioinformatics and clinical trials to study how cancers evolve in the body enabling them to spread and become resistant to therapy in order to find new ways to prevent, detect and treat cancers more effectively.

In recent years it has become clear that every tumour is made up of many different groups of cancer cells, each with their own unique genetic makeup but all related to each other. Some groups of tumour cells develop resistance to treatments such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiotherapy and targeted therapy, meaning that when the cancer comes back it is harder to treat.
 
This diversity, known as intratumour heterogeneity, occurs through evolutionary processes at work inside the tumour as the cells acquire DNA changes (mutations or chromosomal rearrangements) that allow them to respond and adapt to changes in the environment around them.

We are using the latest DNA sequencing technology in the longitudinal clinical evolutionary TRACERx program in lung cancer to unravel the genetic histories of cancer cells within tumours in ever greater detail, teasing out patterns of evolution and genetic diversity, enabling us to decipher the mechanistic basis of drivers of cell-to-cell variation and cancer cell immune evasion.
 
We are investigating the processes that cause mutations and chromosomal instability that accelerate tumour evolution, in order to find tumour cell therapeutic vulnerabilities. We are studying the mechanisms through which immune cell populations impact cancer initiation, immune evasion and metastasis. We are running evolutionary clinical trials with immune and targeted therapies to bring the benefits of our work to patients as quickly as possible.
 
Finally, we are developing new approaches to prevent cancer initiation by understanding the role of chronic inflammation in response to environmental carcinogens such as air pollution and microplastic exposure.