Charles Swanton

Professor Charles Swanton FRCP BSc PhD is a clinician scientist, focusing his work on understanding the challenges inherent in the management of metastatic cancer and their drug resistant and incurable nature. 

Charles completed his PhD in 1998 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories on the UCL MBPhD programme before completing his medical oncology and Cancer Research UK (CRUK) funded postdoctoral clinician scientist training 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 2008. Charles 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.

Charles 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.

Charles has published over 200 papers, with first or senior author publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Nature Genetics, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, Science and the Lancet Oncology. His work has led to insight into genomic diversity within cancers (intratumour heterogeneity) and molecular mechanisms driving cancer branched evolution.

His multidisciplinary team has 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 made Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in April 2011, appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, awarded the Royal Society Napier Professorship in Cancer in 2016, appointed Cancer Research UK’s Chief Clinician in 2017, elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018, 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. 

Charles has been awarded several prizes including the Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize (2015), GlaxoSmithkline Biochemical Society Prize (2016), San Salvatore prize for Cancer Research (2017) and the Ellison-Cliffe Medal, Royal Society of Medicine (2017), recipient of the Gordon Hamilton Fairley Medal (2018), Massachusetts General Hospital, Jonathan Kraft Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research (May 2018), the ESMO Award for Translational Cancer Research (2019), Addario Lung Cancer Foundation Award and Lectureship, International Lung Cancer Congress (July 2020), the Weizmann Institute Sergio Lombroso Award in Cancer Research (2021), International Society of Liquid Biopsy (ISLB) Research Award (2021), the Memorial Sloan Kettering Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research (2021), UCLH Celebrating Excellence Award for Contribution to World Class Research (2022), Inductee to OncLive’s Giants of Cancer Care awards program (2023), SpringerNature CDD Award (2023), the Jeantet-Collen Prize for Translational Medicine (2024), and the Gustave Roussy Prize (2025).