Impact
Alex Cagan is a University Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, with appointments across the Departments of Genetics, Pathology and Veterinary Medicine. His group studies somatic evolution: the mutations that cells in the body accumulate with age, the clonal expansions these can drive, and their consequences for cancer and aging. Using laser capture microdissection and genome sequencing, the group develops methods to map somatic mutational landscapes across diverse species, drawing on comparative evolutionary genomics and samples from collaborations such as London Zoo. In a 2022 Nature study, Cagan and colleagues measured somatic mutation rates in 16 mammalian species and found that the rate at which animals accumulate somatic mutations correlates strongly with lifespan, so that species end their lives with broadly similar mutation burdens; for example, about 800 mutations per year in a mouse cell compared with about 50 in humans. His current work extends this comparative approach to rates of aging, cancer resistance in large, long-lived species (Peto's paradox), and mutational signatures of environmental pollutants. For longevity research, this work links somatic mutation directly to comparative lifespan.
Metrics
- h-index 26 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
90 works · 10,378 citations · h-index 31 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Somatic mutant clones colonize the human esophagus with age ↗ 2018 · 1,196 citations
- SARS-CoV-2 evolution during treatment of chronic infection ↗ 2021 · 1,090 citations
- Great ape genetic diversity and population history ↗ 2013 · 1,000 citations
- Single-cell transcriptomes from human kidneys reveal the cellular identity of renal tumors ↗ 2018 · 844 citations
- Sensitivity of SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 to mRNA vaccine-elicited antibodies ↗ 2021 · 717 citations