Submitted by Irena Rao on Wed, 24/09/2025 - 15:31
Professor Jamie Blundell, group leader at the Early Cancer Institute, is a co-investigator in Team FORTESSA, one of 12 groups who will compete in the final stages of the prestigious Cancer Grand Challenges initiative.
The shortlist of 12 multidisciplinary, global teams is now competing for up to £20m each, with the aim of delivering breakthroughs that no single researcher, lab, institute or country could achieve alone.
Cancer Grand Challenges brings together leading researchers from different disciplines and institutes around the world to take on the most complex challenges in cancer research.
Professor Blundell represents the University of Cambridge, one of seven research institutes collaborating in Team FORTESSA, including the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College, Kyoto University, Harvard University, Keio University and Columbia University.
Team FORTESSA wants to explore the paradox that even when every cell in the body can potentially become cancerous, only the minority in a subset of tissues actually do. In some individuals who have a higher risk of developing cancer, every cell in their body has the potential to become cancerous but very few do and in some cases people never develop cancer. They will study diverse international groups of people to identify anti-cancer mechanisms active across cells, tissues and life-stages. By looking carefully at cells in the tissues of people that do not become cancerous, inverting the ‘follow the tumour’ paradigm, the team will be able to take advantage of the natural diversity and potential protective mechanisms that may already exist in the human body.
In March, Cancer Grand Challenges announced seven new challenges. A record 227 bold submissions were received from world-class teams. Each of the 12 shortlisted teams will now receive £30k in seed funding to allow the team to come together and develop their full research proposal and compete for up to £20m in funding, empowering it to rise above the traditional boundaries of geography and discipline and transform outcomes for people affected by cancer. The funded teams will be announced in March 2026 at the Cancer Grand Challenges Summit in London.
"For the first time we are asking why cancer doesn’t develop when it should," says Dr Jyoti Nangalia, Wellcome Sanger Institute and Team Lead for FORTESSA. "Put another way, most cancer research studies the one house that caught fire. We will study the thousands of houses that didn’t – to discover what keeps them safe. We hope to uncover nature’s hidden protection that is probably hard at work every single day. This could open entirely new ways to prevent cancer before it starts."
Jamie Blundell's group in Cambridge will build models that combine AI with cancer genomics to define an expected trajectory of cancer-related changes in a person’s tissues as they age. This provides a baseline against which we can rationally identify individuals who are resilient to cancer. He says "Studying these individuals provides an opportunity to discover biological mechanisms of cancer avoidance. This includes identifying protective genetic variants, understanding effective immune surveillance, and characterising the cellular states that prevent tumour formation. Learning from these natural examples of resistance is the foundation for developing new, scientifically informed strategies for cancer prevention."
Find out more about the shortlisted teams on the Cancer Grand Challenges website.