Anna Philpott

Developmental Biologist

University of Cambridge

Anna Philpott is a developmental biologist with a long-standing interest in how cells in developing embryos control the decision to divide or to differentiate in co-ordination with cell cycle events, as well as how this co-ordination is subverted in cancers.
After a degree in Natural Sciences, Anna’s PhD under the guidance of Ron Laskey in Cambridge focussed on understanding how sperm chromatin becomes decondensed on fertilisation to allow fusion of the male and female pronuclei. This work started a career-long fascination with development of the early Xenopus frog embryo, and was followed by a first post-doc. at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre in Boston, where she investigated the control of the cell cycle regulator E2F1 in early frog development. She then undertook a second post-doc at Harvard Medical School with Marc Kirschner, studying the role of Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 in nerve and muscle differentiation.
Anna moved back to Cambridge in 1998 to start her own lab in the Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge where she continues to study fundamental mechanisms that allow co-ordination of the cell cycle and differentiation in early development. Recently, she has identified cyclin-dependent kinase-dependent phosphorylation of proneural transcription factors as a critical fulcrum that co-ordinates cell cycle exit and differentiation. This control is subverted in cancers, in particular the paediatric tumour neuroblastoma, and offers a potential new approach to treating this devastating disease.
Anna is now Professor and Head of the School of Biological Sciences, as well as a member of the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She continues to work in multiple systems, and in particular Xenopus frog eggs and embryos, mammalian ES and cancer cells, 3D organoids and genetically engineered mice to understand regulation of proliferation versus differentiation at the biochemical, epigenetic, cell and tissue level.