Cancer Grand Challenges Committee and Panel

Sir Paul Nurse chairs the Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee. Sir Paul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle.

He is Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, and has served as President of the Royal Society, Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK and President of Rockefeller University. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and has received the Albert Lasker Award, the Gairdner Award, the Louis Jeantet Prize and the Royal Society's Royal and Copley Medals. He was knighted by The Queen in 1999, received the Légion d'honneur in 2003 from France, and the Order of the Rising Sun in 2018 from Japan. He served for 15 years on the Council of Science and Technology, advising the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and is presently a Chief Scientific Advisor for the European Union and a trustee of the British Museum.

He brings to the role of Scientific Committee Chair a lifetime of scientific excellence and intellectual rigour.

Professor Suzanne Cory, AC, PhD, FAA, FRS is one of the world’s most eminent molecular biologists. An Australian, she was one of the founders of the field of ‘apoptosis’, the study of how cells are programmed to die. Her work showed that cell death is just as important to cancer as cell growth, and her insights continue to have enormous impact in the field today.

Professor Cory is a past president of the Australian Academy of Science, and former Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. Her many awards include the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, and she has the notable distinction of having had a high school named in her honour.

Professor Edward E. Harlow Jnr, PhD is Professor of Biological Chemistry and Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. In the 1980s, Professor Harlow and his colleagues, including Sir David Lane, a fellow Cancer Grand Challenges panellist, were responsible for a major advance in cancer biology, when they discovered that molecules that protect our cells from cancerous changes – called tumour suppressors – are switched off by other molecules that promote the disease.

Professor Harlow has been awarded the American Cancer Society’s Medal of Honor, and has been elected to both the US National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He was a special advisor to the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director Harold Varmus, and in that role, set up the NCI Provocative Questions initiative, designed to stimulate risky, early-stage cancer research in the US.

He has a wealth of experience in both academia and industry, the latter as Chief Scientific Officer of Constellation Pharmaceuticals, and has sat on the Scientific Advisory Boards of numerous biotech companies.

Professor Sir David Lane, PhD FRS FRSE is one of the world’s most eminent cancer scientists. His discovery of the p53 protein in the 1970s revolutionised our understanding of how cells, including cancer cells, grow and divide. p53, dubbed ‘the Guardian of the Genome’, was the first tumour suppressor found within our cells, and we now know that p53 is faulty or inactivated in the majority of human cancers. Sir David has had a lifelong association with p53 research, and continues to be a leading figure in the field, in terms of both discovery research and drug development.

Formerly Cancer Research UK’s Chief Scientist, Sir David is currently Chief Scientist of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Scientific Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. Knighted in 2000 for services to science, Sir David is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Professor Brian J. Druker, MD is a true hero of the cancer field. He is responsible for a revolution in the treatment of cancer through his development of Gleevec, the first drug to target the genetic defects of a particular cancer while leaving healthy cells unharmed. Gleevec is now the treatment of choice for patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia, and has led the way for many more of the targeted drug therapies now in use in the clinic.

Professor Druker heads the groundbreaking Knight Cancer Institute in Oregon, and is the recipient of some of science’s greatest honours, amongst them the Japan Prize, the Lasker-Debakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the Kettering Prize of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association of Physicians.

Professor Nic Jones formerly served as the Director of the CRUK Manchester Institute and of the CRUK Manchester Major Centre, where he still leads a research team investigating networks of molecules in cells that can help drive cancer development and growth.

Professor Jones’ group are focussing on one particular network that reacts to many different signals - like growth factors - and controls key processes in cells such as when to divide and to self-destruct.

In January 2016, Professor Jones stepped down from the position of CRUK Chief Scientist following 5years in the role. During this time, he helped to shape the life-saving research we fund and translate it into new treatments for patients. 

René Bernards is a professor of molecular carcinogenesis at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. His laboratory uses functional genomic approaches to find vulnerabilities of cancers that can be exploited therapeutically. Using the concept of synthetic lethality, his laboratory searches for combinations of drugs that are lethal for cancer cells and for vulnerabilities of cancer cells of a defined genotype.

Amongst his honours are the Pezcoller Foundation-FECS Recognition for Contribution to Oncology, the Ernst W. Bertner Award for Cancer Research from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the ESMO Lifetime Achievement Award in Translational Research in Breast Cancer. He is also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.

Professor Karen Vousden is Cancer Research UK's Chief Scientist and a Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute.

Karen's research focuses on the tumour suppressor protein p53, which plays an important role in cancer prevention. Her lab is interested in understanding the signals that induce p53 and the functions of p53 that contribute to its ability to prevent cancer progression. This work has also expanded to encompass an interest in cancer metabolism. Ultimately, the hope is to be able find ways to translate this research for cancer therapy.

Karen has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 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 Charles Swanton is the Chief Investigator of the CRUK TRACERx clinical study to decipher lung cancer evolution and is co-director of the CRUK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence.

His multidisciplinary team at The Francis Crick Institute discovered that HLA loss of heterozygosity, cancer cytotoxics, DNA replication stress, cancer genome doubling events and the APOBEC3B cytidine deaminase precipitate cancer diversity, accelerating cancer evolution, providing the substrate for cancer drug resistance and treatment failure.

Charles was appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. He has been awarded the Stand Up To Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize, Glaxo Smithkline Biochemical Society Prize, San Salvatore Prize for Cancer Research and the Ellison-Cliffe Medal, Royal Society of Medicine. He was elected to become an EMBO member in 2017.

Professor Crystal Mackall, MD is the Ernest and Amelia Gallo Family Professor of Paediatrics & Medicine at Stanford University. She serves as Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Cancer Cell Therapy, Associate Director of Stanford Cancer Institute, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Stanford. During a 27 year tenure culminating as Chief of the Paediatric Oncology Branch, NCI, and now at Stanford, she has led an internationally recognised translational research program.  

She is credited with defining the major pathways of T cell homeostasis and has conducted numerous first-in-human and first-in-child clinical trials spanning dendritic cell vaccines, cytokines, and adoptive immunotherapy. Her group was among the first to demonstrate impressive activity of CD19-CAR in pediatric leukemia, developed a novel CD22-CAR that demonstrates impressive activity and has identified major pathways of resistance to CAR therapies.  

She has published over 185 manuscripts and serves in numerous national leadership positions, including Chair of the NCI Paediatric Cancer Immunotherapy Trial Network, and co-Leader of the St. Baldrick’s-StandUp2Cancer Paediatric Dream Team. She is Board Certified in Paediatrics, Paediatric Haematology-Oncology and Internal Medicine.

Professor David Hunter studied medicine at the University of Sydney, before moving to Harvard University where he was the Vincent L. Gregory Professor of Cancer Prevention.  He is the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine, and Director of the Harvard-Oxford Program in Epidemiology.   His early research was on HIV transmission in East Africa, and has been involved in collaborative studies of nutrition and HIV pathogenesis. 

As Director of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention he developed a sample handling and genotyping laboratory to explore genetic associations with cancer, and gene-environment interactions.  He founded the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at Harvard. He was co-chair of the steering committee of the NCI Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3) between 2003 and 2012, was co-director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Markers project focused on genome-wide association studies, and was an Eminent Scholar at the NCI between 2004 and 2009. 

From 2009-2016 he was Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and in 2015-2016 he was Acting Dean.  He is one of about 3,000 “highly cited researchers” worldwide according to Thomson-Reuters. 

Professor Judy Garber is the Susan F. Smith Chair and Chief of the Division of Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  

Professor Garber is a leader in research into characterising and treatment of triple negative or basal-like breast cancer and an expert in Li-Fraumeni Syndrome. Her translational research focuses on the evaluation of novel agents targeting DNA repair defects in breast cancer. 

Professor Garber is a past president of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). She serves on the National Cancer Advisory Board of the National Cancer Institute and was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in 2013. She also serves as the Co-Scientific Director of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and past chair of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Scientific Advisory Board. She is an ASCO Statesman and a Fellow of the AACR Academy.