The Tasmanian devil, Australia’s largest remaining marsupial carnivore, faces extinction in the wild due to the emergence of a new infectious disease. Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) is a contagious cancer that is spread as an allograft during biting. I will discuss how the use of genomics and transcriptomics has helped us to understand the disease, its evolutionary trajectory and played a pivotal role in our quest to save the species from extinction.