lectures

Francis Crick Prize Lecture: Unravelling the origins of childhood cancer

The Royal Society

October 10

The Royal Society

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Join us for the Francis Crick Prize Lecture delivered by Professor Sam Behjati.

The Francis Crick Medal and Lecture 2025 is awarded to Professor Sam Behjati for fundamental discoveries into the developmental roots of childhood cancer.

Cancer is a leading cause of death in children in the UK. It is thought to arise before birth during human development. However, the precise origin of most types of childhood cancer is unknown. Advances in our ability to read DNA and process vast genetic data sets have enabled investigations into the origins of childhood cancer. This includes retrospective lineage tracing approaches that build on using naturally occurring errors in DNA (mutations) as barcodes of human development. In this lecture Sam will present some of the insights retrospective lineage tracing has delivered which may pave the way for early detection and prevention of childhood cancer.

Sam is a Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Clinical Professor of Paediatric Oncology in Cambridge and an Honorary Consultant Paediatric Oncologist. Originally from Germany, he studied medicine at Oxford and trained as a paediatric oncologist in London and Cambridge. He underwent doctoral research training at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, studying the genetic basis of bone and soft tissue cancers. Thereafter he developed a research programme into the origins of cancer, using genomic tools including DNA sequencing and single cell transcriptomics. His research is disease agnostic and occasionally takes him to problems other than cancer, yet his main research focus are childhood cancers. Sam retains a clinical practice in paediatric oncology.

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