News

ANIMATION: Male dogs four times more likely to develop oronasal form of CTVT than femalesA short animation about our latest research that was recently published in the Veterinary Record shows why male dogs are more likely to develop the oronasal form of CTVT.Credit for the animation goes to the talented Emma Werner – thank you for this wonderful co…

Male dogs are four times more likely to develop the rare oronasal form of CTVT than femalesA new paper from the Transmissible Cancer Group published in the Veterinary Record shows that male dogs are four to five times more likely than female dogs to be infected with the oro-nasal form of canine transmissible venereal tumour (CTVT).CTVT usually affe…

Congratulations to Adrian Baez-Ortega, who was officially awareded his PhD degree at the Senate House last week!

There are open positions for PhD students and postdocs at the Transmissible Cancer Group. Come and join us studying dogs and devils! There will be cancer genomics, field work, tumour immunology, single cell RNAseq and more! Closing date 25 February 2022.More information can be found here.

The Transmissible Cancer Group was proud to highlight two important new papers on transmissible cancers in two perspective articles published in Molecular Ecology and Vet Record. The two perspectives commented on fantastic new papers by Hammel et al (Molecular Ecology) and Gibson et al (Vet Record). The new findings describe the geographical distri…

Huge congratulations to Adrian Baez-Ortega on being awarded one of the 2021 Science and SciLifeLab Prizes! Adrian won the award for his essay entitled "As cancer grows old", which describes his PhD research investigating the genetics of the canine transmissible venereal tumour. His essay has been published in Science https://www.science.org/doi/10.…

Transmissible cancers arise rarely in nature. However, these contagious clones may be more frequent than is known at present. We tested whether two cancers affecting aquatic animals are clonally transmitted. Fibropapillomatosis is a cancer affecting green sea turtles, and goldfish are frequently affected by a type of schwannoma. We used a genetic a…

A new paper from the Transmissible Cancer Group at the University of Cambridge Department of Veterinary Medicine reveals how a transmissible cancer has spread through the Tasmanian devil population, and how this cancer’s genome has evolved and diversified during it evolution.Tasmanian devil facial tumour 1 (DFT1) is a transmissible cancer threateni…

Our latest study on selfish mitochondria in the canine transmissible venereal tumour (CTVT) was recently published in Nature Communications. How did this discovery come about? What were the major turning points in our research? Are you interested to look behind the scenes of this latest CTVT article?You can read more in the Story behind the paper r…

Congratulations to Max Stammnitz, who successfully passed his virtual PhD viva on the 7th September 2020!TCG members gathered together (with social distancing) after his viva to celebrate.

A new study by the Transmissible Cancer Group published in Nature Communications today!Previous research has shown that at several points in history, mitochondria - which are compartments providing cells with their energy - from unrelated host dogs have been captured by CTVT, perhaps to aid survival of this long-lived cancer lineage. The capture of…

Many congratulations to Adrian Baez-Ortega, who won Weintraub Graduate student Award for 2020!The Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award recognizes outstanding achievement during graduate studies in the biological sciences. This is a very prestigious international graduate student award from the US!  Awardees will participate in a scientific sy…

TCG second PhD, Dr. Maire Ni Leathlobhair, was officially graduated!Maire obtained her PhD from Cambridge in 2018 and used computational and statistical modelling of genomic data to understand the origin and evolution of transmissible cancer. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Cancer Genomics group led by Dr David Wedge at the Oxfor…

Congratulations to Dr. Maire Ni Leathlobhair!TCG second PhD, Dr. Maire Ni Leathlobhair, was officially graduated!Maire obtained her PhD from Cambridge in 2018 and used computational and statistical modelling of genomic data to understand the origin and evolution of transmissible cancer during her doctorate project, and her research was published o…