Rate My Professor Charles Swanton

Professor Charles Swanton is a clinician scientist at University College London whose research focuses on the challenges of managing metastatic cancer and its drug-resistant nature. He completed his PhD in 1998 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories through the UCL MBPhD programme and finished his medical oncology training along with a Cancer Research UK-funded postdoctoral clinician scientist fellowship in 2008. In 2008 he was appointed CRUK senior clinical research fellow and Group Leader of the Translational Cancer Therapeutics Laboratory at the London Research Institute, now part of the Francis Crick Institute, and consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital. In 2011 he was appointed Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Chair in Personalised Cancer Medicine at the UCL Cancer Institute, and Consultant Thoracic Medical Oncologist at UCL Hospitals.

Swanton serves as Chief Investigator of the CRUK TRACERx clinical study on lung cancer evolution and co-director of the CRUK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence. He has published more than 200 papers as first or senior author in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Nature Genetics, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, Science and the Lancet Oncology. His work has advanced understanding of intratumour heterogeneity and the molecular mechanisms of cancer branched evolution, including discoveries related to HLA loss of heterozygosity, DNA replication stress, genome doubling and APOBEC3B cytidine deaminase. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, received the Royal Society Napier Professorship in Cancer in 2016, was appointed Cancer Research UK’s Chief Clinician in 2017, elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 and Fellow of the Academy of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2020, and appointed Deputy Clinical Director of the Francis Crick Institute in 2023. Among numerous awards, he received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Translational Medicine in 2024.