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The Crick magazine, spring 2026

The Francis Crick Institute

Crick Lectures are delivered by leading internationally-renowned scientists from the Francis Crick Institute and elsewhere and cover the full spectrum of biomedical research. They aim to be relatively accessible to scientists in all biomedical disciplines, whilst also offering something for the specialist.

The talks are open to scientists from other institutes and universities from across London and beyond. You should have a minimum of graduate-level biological knowledge to attend and fully engage with these talks. Find out how to attend here. 

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Deputy Clinical Director Charles Swanton runs the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability lab here at the Crick alongside his clinical work at University College London Hospital (UCLH).

Professor Charles Swanton FRCP BSc PhD is a clinician scientist, focusing his work on understanding the challenges inherent in the management of metastatic cancer and their drug resistant and incurable nature. His lab is the largest one at the Crick with more than 100 members; it is 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.

The Swanton group has demonstrated that intratumour heterogeneity, through tumour sampling bias, impacts upon our ability to successfully qualify cancer biomarkers for clinical use. It has also found evidence for extensive parallel evolution in human tumours, with multiple spatially separated subclones acquiring distinct mutations in the same gene, protein complex or signal transduction pathway, suggesting profound constraints to tumour evolution that might be exploited for therapeutic benefit.

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