News

Well done to all our undergraduate students, Anna, Emily and Summer, for submitting their end-of-project reports! Thumbs up on your presentations, too!

Our annual TCG walk to Horningsea! What a fun day with opportunities for a lot of discussions on fresh air and a wonderful lunch at Horningsea.

The Transmissible Cancer Group members ran two activity stalls at the Vet School's Cambridge Science Festival open day.A mysterious disease is spreading among the Tasmanian Devils, and we need your help to crack the case! Embark on an exciting fieldwork mission to protect this emblematic species from the disease that is threatening it.Become a DNA …

Happy New Year 2026 from the TCG! We started the social TCG gatherings of this year with a lunch to celebrate birthdays of a number of TCG members. We also welcomed new members to our lab and had a visit from Nicolas Bierne, a population geneticist from the University of Montpellier.Now we are all looking forward to the exciting discoveries in the …

Christmas TCG celebration with lots of amazing cultural food, fun quiz and a Secret Santa! Merry Christmas, everyone!

Dr Julie Dragon from the University of Vermont visited the TCG group and gave a fascinating talk to the whole department. She talked about a melanoma, which has been present in brown bullheads (a type of catfish) in a lake spanning Vermont, USA and Quebec, Canada since 2012, and their genetic analysis of these samples. We all had a lovely dinner in…

A number of TCG members took part and presented their work at the third biennial Companion Animal Genetic Health (CAGH) conference which was held on 8th-9th December in Cambridge. It was a wonderful collaborative meeting with lots of inspiring talks, discussions and a conference dinner at the St John's college. Many thanks to the organisers, and we…

Some of the TCG group members attended the 1st POPCAN meeting at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London on 1st December - it was an afternoon full of stimulating talks (including one by our PI, Liz Murchison) as well as an authentic experience of the London underground during rush hours. We look forward to the next one!

The founder of WECare, Dr Janey Lowes, visited the Transmissible Cancer Group to share her experience of TVT in street dogs of Sri Lanka. It was a fascinating presentation with lots of photos to show how effective vincristine treatment can be when treating TVT infection in dogs - Janey and her team have treated some horrific TVT cases with an amazi…

Congratulations to one of our undergraduate students, Rebecca Scott, who has been shortlisted as one of the final three students of the Fellows of the Future Student Competition to present her research at this year’s RCVS Fellowship Day! Rebecca’s project work focused on the face and body location of tumours in Tasmanian devils infected with Devil …

The first TCG movie night at the cinema! What a fun social evening for the whole group – we went to see a movie filmed just around the corner, in some of the University of Cambridge colleges!

The Transmissible Cancer Group is now recruiting a PhD student for an exciting new project investigating the long-term stability of DNA methylation in mammalian transmissible cancers.This research will provide intriguing insights into how gene expression programmes evolve over extended time periods, potentially illuminating fundamental aspects of c…

We had an enriching time listening to Anna Schönbichler’s presentation about her work on Tasmanian devil cell lines. Anna is currently a PhD student at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. Thank you for sharing your interesting results with us, Anna!

In September, members of the TCG group had the pleasure of meeting Grace Russell from the Menzies Institute of Medical Research at the University of Tasmania, who told us about her work on adenovirus receptor modelling and on nanobodies. Thank you for your visit, Grace!

The Transmissible Cancer Group soaked up the sun, enjoyed Cambridge views, and even tried our hand at frisbee on the 2025 punting trip. Events like this are extremely important to us as a team, providing opportunities to chat and connect outside of the lab.