James Hadfield

James leads the development of Epigenomics technologies in AstraZeneca’s Translational Medicine function. This includes developing internal assay and technology capabilities to support clinical studies through external collaboration and partnering opportunities; and requires increasing the knowledge of Epigenomics opportunities across the company. As a very wide field Epigenomics offers many such opportunities but perhaps just one challenge – too many choices. As such, his technical focus is on DNA methylation, nucleosome positioning and histone modification.

He is also leading on the scouting of liquid biopsy novel technologies for cancer early detection, MRD/monitoring and the subsequent initial evaluation of these methods.

Before joining AstraZeneca he led the Genomics Core at the University of Cambridge CRUK Cambridge Institute and has worked with genomics/ transcriptomics technologies, especially NGS, for more than 20 years.

James got his degree and PhD at the University of East Anglia. He has co-authored multiple papers in cancer genomics including one of the largest genomic studies of Breast Cancer (Nature 2012), some of the first reports of ctDNA liquid biopsy: using amplicons (STM 2012) or exomes (Nature 2013) and developed a sWGS CNV pipeline for exome sequencing (Cell 2016).

He has been highly involved in the NGS community and writes/wrote a very well received blog and is considered a thought-leader in the field. James is married with two kids and lives in Wymondham Norfolk.