Professor Vassilou leads the Vassiliou Group, a team dedicated to understanding how blood stem cells turn cancerous, and to developing new ways to predict, prevent and treat blood cancers.

Each day, the human body makes more than 200 billion new blood cells from a small pool of blood stem cells. Over the course of a lifetime, these stem cells gradually pick up random changes in their DNA, and a small number of these changes can cause a stem cell to multiply and produce many copies of itself. This is called clonal haematopoiesis, and it becomes increasingly common as people get older. In some people, it goes on to develop into a blood cancer such as Acute Myeloid Leukaemia or Myelodysplastic Syndrome.

The group's research focuses on the next frontier in blood cancer care: catching the disease before it takes hold. The team studies which genetic faults make blood cancer cells vulnerable, so that new treatments can be designed to target them. They also study large groups of healthy people to work out who is at risk of developing blood cancer, and why some people with early warning signs go on to develop the disease while others do not. Their work has already led to tools that can predict a person's risk of leukaemia years before any symptoms appear, and continues to open up new possibilities for spotting the disease early, preventing it, and treating it more effectively.

Supporting this research will help unlock new approaches that go beyond treating blood cancer after it develops, toward predicting and preventing it before it starts.