University College London London, United Kingdom
Professor of Cancer Medicine Chair, Personalised Medicine Principal Investigator and Deputy Clinical Director, Francis Crick Institute
Exploring specific genetic alterations responsible for cancer relapse in order to develop more effective treatments.
The extent of cell-to-cell diversity within a tumor can drive cancer growth and spread, leading to poorer outcomes for patients. Understanding how common this heterogeneity is and how it affects the progression of breast cancer is crucial for improving treatment. Previous research on triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) has either looked at snapshots of tumors at a single point in time or followed tumor changes over time in small groups of patients. Dr. Swanton is focused on small, circular DNA called extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA)—that are associated with worse prognosis in TNBC. In the next year, his team will build on this work and utilize ecDNA analysis to evaluate TNBC over time, from its early stages through treatment and to metastasis. Dr. Swanton is also interested in the genetic causes of inherited breast cancer particularly since mutations in genes such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 are often found in TNBC and many families with a history of breast cancer. His team will employ a new technology to identify structural changes in DNA that may provide new genetic clues to familial breast cancer risk.
Dr. Swanton’s team will use advanced blood tests to monitor tumor DNA released into the bloodstream (ctDNA) and identify ecDNA fragments that may provide a comprehensive view of tumor evolution during treatment. They will also employ a new technology to identify structural changes in DNA from 50 families with a history of breast cancer but no known genetic mutations, seeking new genetic clues to familial risk of developing breast cancer.
Charles Swanton, MD PhD completed his training in 1999 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories and the Cancer Research UK clinician scientist/medical oncology training program in 2008. Dr. Swanton runs the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute and combines his research with clinical duties at UCLH, focused on how tumors evolve over space and time. His research focuses on branched evolutionary histories of solid tumors, 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.
Dr. Swanton was appointed to several prestigious societies: Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in April 2011; Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015; Napier Professor in Cancer by the Royal Society in 2016; Cancer Research UK’s Chief Clinician in 2017; and elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018. He has been awarded several prizes including the Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize (2015), Glaxo Smith Kline Biochemical Society Prize (2016), and the San Salvatore Prize for Cancer Research (2017).
He has also received several honors; the Ellison-Cliffe Medal; election into the Royal Society of Medicine (2017); the Gordon Hamilton Fairley Medal (2018); and the ESMO Award for Translational Cancer Research (2019). More recently, he received the UCL Hospitals Celebrating Excellence Award for contribution to world class research (2022) and, in 2021, received the Memorial Sloan Kettering Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the Weizmann Institute Sergio Lombroso Award in Cancer Research, and the International Society of Liquid Biopsy Research Award.
2012
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