DNRF Chair: Professor Ana Cvejic

As DNRF Chair, Ana Cvejic will study how behaviour of immune cells changes in solid tumours to support their growth. She plans to leverage the existing platforms and expertise at the BRIC as well as her links to a network of international collaborators that are leading experts in single-cell genomics and spatial transcriptomics. The results from these studies will have high therapeutic impact through identification of new therapeutic targets in cancer.

Ana Cvejic’s research focuses on understanding how blood cells develop and how is their development and their ultimate function determined/influenced by their environment and environmental cues. The ultimate aim of the lab is to use this knowledge to develop new ways to treat disease and improve human health.

Blood stem cells need to both perpetuate (self-renew) themselves and differentiate into all mature blood cells to maintain blood formation throughout life. Clarifying how haemopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) differentiate into diverse cell types is important for understanding how this process is subverted in the generation of blood pathologies.

The aim of the Cvejic group is to decipher how differentiation pathways of HSPCs are influenced by different microenvironments. To achieve that Cvejic lab uses state-of-the-art single-cell data generation combined with computational analysis to establish principles of blood lineage differentiation.

Ongoing research deals with human foetal haematopoietic cells to reveal the dynamics and cellular programmes active during human blood development as well as cancer patient samples