Putting the world’s best minds on cancer’s greatest challenges

Professor Sir David Lane is one of the world’s most eminent cancer scientists and is chair of the Scientific Committee. His discovery of the p53 protein in the 1970s revolutionised our understanding of how cells, including cancer cells, grow and divide. Dubbed the ‘guardian of the genome’, p53 was the first tumour suppressor found within our cells, and we now know that it is faulty or inactive in the majority of human cancers. Sir David continues to be a leading figure in the field of p53 and tumour suppressor research, in terms of both discovery research and drug development. 

Knighted in 2000 for his services to science, Sir David is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He previously served as Chief Scientist of Cancer Research UK.  

Professor René Bernards is best known for his work on tumour genetics to personalise treatments for people with cancer. His accomplishments include the development of MammaPrint – the first gene expression tool to be used for the diagnosis and clinical management of breast cancer – and of a vector system that can be used to identify potentially powerful combinations of cancer. Some of these combinations are now approved for clinical use.  

Amongst René’s honours are the Pezcoller Foundation-FECS Recognition for Contribution to Oncology, the Ernst W Bertner Award for Cancer Research from the MD Anderson Cancer Center and the ESMO Lifetime Achievement Award in Translational Research in Breast Cancer. He is also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the AACR Academy. 

Professor Judy E. Garber is a leader in clinical cancer genetics, with a special focus on the prevention and treatment of breast cancer in people who have a higher genetic risk of developing the disease. She has played a major role in the development of national guidelines for cancer genetics, including how high-risk people, particularly those with BRCA mutations, should be supported and treated.   

Judy is a past President and current Member of the Foundation Board of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and a Fellow of the AACR Academy. She serves as the Scientific Director of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in 2013. She also previously served on the National Cancer Advisory Board for the National Cancer Institute.  

Michael is a Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel in Switzerland. He is a world leader in the fields of TOR signalling and cell growth control, after discovering TOR in 1991 and subsequently elucidating its role in growth and metabolism. Michael’s research group at Biozentrum studies TOR signalling and growth control in various model systems, and the role TOR plays in the development of a variety of disorders, including cancer. Mike works closely with clinicians to translate the group’s findings into the human context. 

Professor David Hunter is a world-renowned epidemiologist and expert in global health. His early work focussed on HIV transmission in East Africa. More recently, David has led long-term population studies to better understand the links between cancer – especially breast, bowel, skin and prostate cancers – and its causes.  

David founded the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, where he also served as a Dean. For 9 years, he co-chaired the steering committee of the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium at the National Cancer Institute, where he was appointed as an Eminent Scholar and co-directed the Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Markers project, among the first genome-wide association studies of cancers. 

Professor Sherene Loi, MD, PhD is a Medical Oncologist specialised in breast cancer treatment as well as a clinician scientist (group leader) with expertise in genomics, immunology and drug development at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia. She is recognised internationally as a leading clinician scientist whose work has led to new insights into the breast cancer immunology field as well as leading international clinical trials in breast cancer immunotherapy. To date, she has published over 285 peer-reviewed research articles with a lifetime H-index of >100. Her recent work has been highly influential: she is ranked in the top 1% of highly cited researchers globally by the Web of Science. She Co-Chairs the International Breast Cancer Study Group (IBCSG) based in Bern, Switzerland, one of the largest global academic breast cancer trial cooperative groups. She is a current holder of the Inaugural National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) of Australia Endowed Chair and in 2021 received one of the Prime Ministers’ Awards for Science.

Professor Crystal Mackall is a paediatric oncologist who has pioneered immunotherapies for children with cancer. She has played a role in the development of important CAR-T cell therapies for leukaemia and has conducted many first-in-human and first-in-child clinical trials. Crystal’s work has transformed our understanding of how our T cells – the cancer-detecting cells of the immune system – are regulated, having identified the essential roles of the thymus and the protein IL-7 in this process.  

Crystal leads an internationally recognised translational research programme at Stanford University and co-leads St Baldrick’s Foundation-Stand Up To Cancer Paediatric Dream Team, to develop new immunotherapies for childhood cancers that remain intractable to therapy. She previously served as Chief of the Pediatric Oncology Branch at the US National Institutes of Health.  

Professor Jill Mesirov brings a wealth of mathematics and computer science expertise to the committee, having spent many years applying her skills to solve challenges in the fields of science, engineering and business. Her current research focusses on using machine learning to better understand cancer biology and improve treatment. She is committed to bringing these techniques to the wider research community through the development of practical, accessible and open-source software tools – almost 500,000 researchers around the world are currently using these tools to facilitate their work.  

Prior to joining the University of California San Diego, Jill was Associate Director and Chief Informatics Officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program. Jill is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the International Society for Computational Biology and the Association for Women in Mathematics, for which she has previously served as President.  

Dr. Timothy Rebbeck is the Vincent L. Gregory, Jr. Professor of Cancer Prevention at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He is founding director of the Zhu Family Center for Global Cancer Prevention at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and leads the Cancer Outreach and Engagement activities for the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center. He leads molecular epidemiology studies to address problems of cancer etiology, prevention, outcomes, health disparities and global health. His work has led to an understanding of the genetic and environmental causes of breast, prostate, skin, endometrial and ovarian cancers as well as interventions intended to reduce the burden of these cancers in individuals and populations. He founded and continues to lead international cancer consortia that study risk and outcomes in prostate cancer in men of African descent in North America and Africa.

Professor Barbara K. Rimer is a behavioural scientist with expertise in cancer prevention and motivating the public to make informed decisions around their own risk of cancer – such as attending cancer screening, quitting smoking or understanding more about their genetic risk. Barbara’s work has demonstrated that psychological and accessibility barriers to screening remain, even after economic barriers are removed, and she was the first researcher to develop smoking cessation interventions aimed specifically at older smokers. Her research has guided cancer practice and policy in the US for more than 30 years.  

Barbara is the first woman and behavioural scientist to chair the National Cancer Institute’s National Cancer Advisory Board and was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the President’s Cancer Panel, which she chaired from 2011 to 2019. She is a recipient of the American Cancer Society’s Medal of Honor for her research into cancer control.  

Lillian is a senior medical oncologist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, Canada, where she is the Director of the Phase I Clinical Trials Program and Clinical Lead for the Tumor Immunotherapy Programme, and holds the BMO Chair in Precision Cancer Genomics. She is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto, with a major research focus in the area of new anticancer drug development including precision medicine and immunotherapeutics. She has served on the Board of Directors for both the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). Professor Siu is the Co-Contact Principal Investigator of a multi-centre phase I UM1 grant sponsored by the United States National Cancer Institute. She has been awarded the TAT 2020 Honorary Award for her contributions in the development of anticancer drugs; and she was honored with the 2020 International Women who Conquer Cancer Mentorship Award from ASCO. Lillian is the inaugural co-Editor-in-Chief for AACR’s newest journal Cancer Research Communications, and she is on the editorial board for Cell and Cancer Cell.

Professor Charles Swanton combines his laboratory research with clinical duties and his work as director of the Cancer Research UK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence, focussed on how tumours evolve over space and time. Charles has helped to define the branched evolutionary histories of solid tumours, processes that drive cancer cell-to-cell variation in the form of new cancer mutations or chromosomal instabilities, and the impact of such cancer diversity on effective immune surveillance and clinical outcome. 

Charles is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Society and the American Association for Cancer Research. He is a Royal Society Napier Professor and was appointed Cancer Research UK’s Chief Clinician in 2017. Charles is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including: the Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize, GlaxoSmithKline Biochemical Society Prize, San Salvatore Prize for Cancer Research, the Ellison-Cliffe Medal, Royal Society of Medicine, the Gordon Hamilton Fairley Medal, the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre Kraft Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Paul A Bunn Scientific Award for achievements in lung cancer, the ESMO Award for Translational Research and the Bonnie J Addario Lectureship Award (GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer).  

Across 2020, Charles played a vital role in setting up a COVID-19 testing facility at the Francis Crick Institute in London for frontline workers.  

Professor Karen Vousden’s research hones in on two key questions: how do changes in metabolism affect the development and progression of cancer? And how does the protein p53 – a tumour suppressor that plays an important role in cancer prevention – control tumour development? Ultimately, the hope is to find new ways to translate this research to improve cancer therapy.  

Karen has been elected as a Fellow of a number of prestigious organisations, including the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, EMBO, the European Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association of Cancer Research Academy and the National Academy of Sciences. 

Professor KJ Patel is Chief Scientist of CRUK, Director of the Weatherall Institute for Molecular Medicine, and Director of the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit at the University of Oxford. KJ trained in medicine in London and spent his research career until recently at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge which is one of the premier research institutes in the world. He was also professor for molecular medicine and stem cell genomics at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the molecular basis of inherited genomic instability and the role it plays in the biology of stem cells particularly those that make blood. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences UK (FMedSci) and also a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO).