Hematology seminars

Basic research, technological advances and clinical observations can converge to produce major therapeutic breakthroughs. Examples from lung cancer, spinal muscular atrophy and hemophilia illustrate how curiosity-driven science contributed to medicines including osimertinib, risdiplam and emicizumab. The lecture follows discoveries across the decades between initial biological insights and effective treatments, examining the persistence, unexpected findings and collaboration across disciplines that made these advances possible. It considers how biological, clinical and technological research connect in the development of new medicines.

Emmanuelle Passegué examines why mechanisms that maintain blood-forming stem cells in early life can contribute to their deterioration with age. The lecture connects cell-cycle control, marrow support, inflammation, metabolic regulation and cellular memory to altered self-renewal and blood-cell production. It also considers genomic instability, clonal hematopoiesis and progression toward leukemia.

Blood production can be rapidly reorganised after infection or marrow injury. This lecture follows the molecular, cellular and metabolic responses of stem and progenitor cells that accelerate myeloid-cell output. It then examines how persistent or misdirected activation of these emergency mechanisms can contribute to chronic inflammatory disease and cancer.

This lecture examines how bone-marrow structure and stromal cells regulate blood-forming stem and progenitor cells. It reviews technologies that reveal the spatial organisation and signalling relationships of these populations. Particular attention is given to mesenchymal stromal cells, blood-lineage production and responses to infection and inflammation.

This lecture introduces the stem-cell hierarchy that continuously replenishes blood. It explains how largely quiescent, self-renewing hematopoietic stem cells generate progenitors supporting red cells, platelets and immune lineages. New ideas about differentiation, lineage bias and priming are used to reconsider how this hierarchy maintains everyday blood production.

Lifestyle factors such as sleep, diet, stress, and exercise, profoundly influence cardiovascular health. Seeking to understand how lifestyle affects our biology is important for at least two reasons. First, it can expose a particular lifestyle’s biological impact, which can be leveraged for adopting specific public health policies. Second, such work may identify crucial molecular mechanisms central to how the body adapts to our environments. These insights can then be used to improve our lives. In this talk, I will focus on recent work in the lab exploring how lifestyle factors influence cardiovascular health. I will show how combining tools of neuroscience, hematology, immunology, and vascular biology helps us better understand how the brain shapes leukocytes in response to environmental perturbations. By “connecting the dots” from the brain to the vessel wall, we can begin to elucidate how lifestyle can both maintain and perturb salutogenesis.