Group Leader:
Tim Somervaille
I trained in Medicine at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School (now part of Imperial College London) and University College London. Following postgraduate training in General Medicine in London, I underwent Specialist training in Clinical Haematology at University College London, where I also studied for a PhD in Professor Asim Khwaja’s laboratory as a Medical Research Council Clinical Training Fellow. Subsequently, as a Leukaemia Research Fund Senior Clinical Fellow, I spent four years in Professor Michael Cleary’s laboratory undertaking postdoctoral studies in leukaemia. I now lead the Leukaemia Biology group at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research and am also Honorary Consultant in Haematology at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Xu Huang,
James Lynch
Senior Scientific Officer
Gary Spencer
PhD Students
William Harris
Julian Blaser (co-supervised with Nullin Divecha)
Leukaemia Group
Human acute myeloid leukaemias (AMLs) are heterogeneous with respect to the function of the cells that make up the disease. A minority of the cells are so called leukaemia stem cells (LSCs) which have the ability to self-renew for an extended, if not indefinite, period, while maintaining and expanding the disease. In order to cure a patient these cells must be eliminated completely, because if they are not, they have the ability to regenerate the disease and induce clinical relapse. Understanding the cellular mechanisms that regulate the self-renewal of the LSC compartment represents a critical current problem in leukaemia biology. The aim of my lab is to further the understanding of the biology of human LSCs, in order to identify genes and cellular pathways that are critical for their function and which could be targeted by novel therapies.