Date: 27 November 2026 (Friday)
Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road 
Host: Dr. Gladys Poon

Jamie Blundell is the Ursula Zoellner Professor of Cancer Research at the Early Cancer Institute, University of Cambridge, where he studies how cancer evolves from normal tissue in the decades before diagnosis. A theoretical physicist by training, he uses evolutionary theory and ultra-sensitive sequencing to track mutant clones in blood samples collected from the same people over many years. The aim is to predict who will develop cancer long before symptoms appear. His group also studies how the immune system recognises early cancers, using large-scale measurements of T-cell receptor–antigen interactions and machine learning. Jamie did his PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory and his postdoctoral work at Stanford with Daniel Fisher and Dmitri Petrov. He is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow.

Resolving the lineage history of human cells is fundamental to understanding ageing and cancer but remains hampered by a lack of native, high-resolution markers. Here, we identify the protocadherin (PCDH) gene cluster as a naturally occurring, highly diverse methylation barcode. While PCDH methylation creates neuronal diversity in the brain, we show that stochastic methylation patterns in this region are maintained as heritable, evolvable lineage markers across multiple non-neuronal tissues, including blood, kidney, prostate, and bladder. By tracking these barcodes in serial samples over a decade, we reveal clonal dynamics with high fidelity, quantitatively recapitulating genetic clone sizes. Crucially, PCDH barcodes identify “cryptic” clonal expansions invisible to standard driver-mutation sequencing and resolve subclonal architectures via continuous epimutation. This native barcoding system provides a scalable, driver-agnostic framework for reconstructing somatic evolution in humans.

All are welcome.