Connor Sweeney

I am a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow and Specialist Registrar in Haematology. I began my undergraduate training at the University of Cambridge before completing clinical training in Oxford. Following qualification, I was awarded an NIHR Academic Foundation Post and subsequently an Academic Clinical Fellowship. These have enabled me to pursue my research interests alongside clinical practice.

My research focuses on acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), the commonest aggressive leukaemia in adults. I am particularly interested in the immune control of AML following allogeneic stem cell transplantation. The curative effect of stem cell transplantation relies on alloreactivity of donor T cells against cancer cells, which is known as Graft-versus-Leukaemia (GvL). Remarkably, despite being administered for over 50 years, our understanding of the AML antigens that trigger and sustain a donor T cell response after allo-SCT is very limited. I use a combination of next-generation sequencing, bioinformatic analysis and immunology assays to characterise GvL responses in AML.