Rate My Professor Charlie Swanton

Professor Charles Swanton FRCP BSc PhD is a clinician scientist and Clinical Director at The Francis Crick Institute. He completed his PhD in 1998 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories on the UCL MBPhD programme and finished his medical oncology and CRUK-funded postdoctoral clinician scientist training 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. 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 in 2011. Swanton leads the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory and 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 over 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 research has advanced understanding of intratumour heterogeneity and branched cancer evolution. Swanton was appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, awarded the Royal Society Napier Professorship in Cancer in 2016, appointed CRUK’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. He has received numerous prizes including the Stand Up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize, the ESMO Award for Translational Cancer Research and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research.

Swanton’s multidisciplinary work combines functional cell biology, cancer bioinformatics and clinical trials to study mechanisms driving cancer diversity, including HLA loss of heterozygosity, DNA replication stress, genome doubling and APOBEC3B activity, which accelerate evolution and contribute to drug resistance. He is also Chair in Personalised Cancer Medicine at UCL and maintains clinical duties as a thoracic medical oncologist.