Professor Brian Huntly

Prof Brian Huntly is a clinical research scientist who combines running a laboratory group with his practice as a Consultant Haematologist in Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He is also Head of the Department of Haematology at the University of Cambridge. Internationally, he is a member of the European Haematology Association Executive Board and Research Committee and Chair of their Fellowships and Grants Committee. He studied Medicine at Edinburgh, trained in Haematology in Dundee and Cambridge and is a member of the Royal College of Physicians and a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists. He studied for his PhD in Cambridge and performed post-doctoral work at Harvard, prior to winning the EHA-José Carreras Young Investigator Award and returning to Cambridge to set up his own research group. The interest of his group is in understanding how normal stem and progenitor cell function is subverted during the step-wise evolution of haematological malignancies, particularly acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and malignant lymphomas. The group focus particularly on transcriptional and epigenetic alterations and combine functional, genomic and proteomic techniques in mouse and cell line models, as well as human primary tumour tissue, to identify disease mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets. Notable achievements include:

• The first demonstration that chronic and acute myeloid leukaemia may arise in separate stem and progenitor cells (Cancer Cell 2004);
• The discovery (with Tony Kouzarides) of an essential role for BET transcriptional regulators in AML and showed that BET inhibitors provide a novel therapeutic approach (Nature 2011)
• The discovery that malignant lymphomas may initiate in stem and progenitor cells prior to lymphoid commitment (Nature Cell Biology 2017);
• Establishing (with George Vassiliou) that tumour suppression by UTX/KDM6a is mediated by enhancer and chromatin remodeling but that it does not require catalytic activity (Nature Genetics 2018).