Professor Sir John Burn gave the 2024 CPM Annual Lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on Tuesday 26th March. Professor Sir John Burn obtained a first class honours degree in human genetics and an MD with distinction from Newcastle University, where he has been Professor of Clinical Genetics since 1991. He was appointed as a consultant specialist in Newcastle in 1984 and led the regional NHS Genetics Service for 20 years. He helped to create the Millennium Landmark Centre for Life, which houses an education, and science centre alongside NHS regional genetics and fertility services and University research. He is chair of the Newcastle based DNA device company QuantuMDx Ltd. He was knighted in 2010 and chosen as one of the first 20 ‘local heroes’ to have a brass plaque on Newcastle Quayside in 2014. He is a Trustee of the European Hereditary Tumour Group, UNESCO NGO Global Variome and HUGO (the Human Genome Organisation) London. He is Vice President of HUGO international. Former roles include founding Chair the UK Cancer Genetics Group (1997-2003) and of the International Society for Gastrointestinal Hereditary Tumours (InSiGHT 2003-5), President of the European Society of Human Genetics (2006-2007), Chair of the British Society for Genetic Medicine (2011-2013), Lead Clinician, Northern Strategic Health Authority (2010-2014), Non-executive Director NHS England (2014-2018) and Chair of Newcastle Hospitals (2017 -2023). He leads the Cancer Prevention Programme research group at Newcastle University; CAPP2, an RCT in 16 countries, showed that aspirin reduces by half the risk of colorectal cancer in Lynch syndrome (Burn et al Lancet 2020) and resistant starch supplements reduce the risk of other LS cancers by more than half (Mathers et al Cancer Prev Research 2022).

Professor Mary Dixon Woods gave the 2023 CPM Annual Lecture on 27th April 2023. This event took place at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. Mary Dixon-Woods is Director of THIS Institute and The Health Foundation Professor of Healthcare Improvement Studies in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of General Practitioners, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. A Professorial Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge, Mary is also an NIHR Senior Investigator. Mary served on England’s National Advisory Group on the Safety of Patients in England, which produced the Berwick report in 2013. She also served on the review of information technology in the NHS led by Professor Bob Wachter, which reported in 2016. She was a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator 2012-2019. Mary was the Harveian Orator for the Royal College of Physicians in 2018, the 500th anniversary of the College’s founding. She is a member of the BMJ’s international advisory board. Research Interests Mary’s programme of research is concerned with generating a high quality evidence-base to support improvement in the organisation, quality and safety of healthcare. Characteristically using mixed-methods approaches, her work focuses on evaluation of quality and safety improvement interventions and programmes, culture and behaviour in health systems, and regulation and governance of health research and care. She has a special interest in methodological innovation in the study of healthcare improvement.

Professor Andrew Hattersley gave the 2022 CPM Annual Lecture on Thursday 26th May. This event took place at the Sheldonian Theatre. Professor Andrew Hattersley is the Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Exeter, UK and a practicing consultant diabetologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital. He trained in Medicine at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. His postgraduate education was in London, Oxford and Birmingham. Working with Professor Sian Ellard he has taken Exeter from being a centre with no genetics laboratory in 1995 to now being the top international laboratory for monogenic diabetes with over 20,000 referrals from 105 countries. They have discovered 25 genes which when mutated cause monogenic diabetes. Importantly he has gone on from gene discovery to find the best treatment for monogenic diabetes. He has shown that the commonest forms of both familial genetic diabetes and neonatal diabetes can be treated with tablets instead of insulin resulting in better blood sugar control. Recent work has focused on “Precision Diabetes” identifying subgroups in Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes with different treatment responses. He has published over 600 papers with over 90,000 citations, given over 350 national and international lecturers and received many international and national awards for his work including being appointed as a fellow of The Royal Society and being awarded a CBE.

Dr Adam Rutherford is a British geneticist, author, and broadcaster. He was an audio-visual content editor for the journal Nature for a decade, and is a frequent contributor to the newspaper The Guardian. He hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science, has produced several science documentaries and has published books related to genetics and the origin of life.

This talk was recorded at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford on 28th November 2019. Professor Dame Sue Hill OBE PhD DSC CBiol FRSB Hon FRCP Hon FRCPath is the Chief Scientific Officer for England, providing expert clinical scientific advice across the health system. She is head of profession for the healthcare science workforce in the NHS and associated bodies, embracing more than 50 separate scientific specialisms. Sue is the Senior Responsible Officer for Genomics in NHS England, leading developments in this area, having previously established the NHS Genomic Medicine Centres and led the NHS contribution to the 100,000 Genomes Project. She is a respiratory scientist by background with an international academic and clinical research reputation.

CPM Annual Lecture 2018. Given by Professor Charles Swanton, Francis Crick Institute on 22nd Novmeber 2018. 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 210 papers, with first or senior author publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Nature Genetics, Cancer Discovery, Cancer Cell, Science & 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 appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015. Charles was awarded 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). Charles was appointed Napier Professor in Cancer by the Royal Society in 2016. Charles was elected EMBO member and was appointed the Cancer Research UK Chief Clinician in 2017 and was awarded the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre Kraft Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research in 2018.

On November 9 2016, David Altshuler, Executive Vice President, Global Research and Chief Scientific Officer, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, gave the Centre for Personalised Medicine’s Annual Lecture; ‘Humanizing Drug Discovery”. Dr Altshuler joined Vertex in 2015. He leads Vertex’s research efforts aimed at discovering new medicines for the treatment of serious diseases and oversees the company’s five research sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. A physician and human geneticist, Dr Altshuler was one of the four founding members of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as Deputy Director and Chief Academic Officer as well as Director of Medical and Population Genetics. He was Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Biology at MIT (adjunct), and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. His scientific research was focused on creating a scientific foundation of genomic methods used to discover and validate new drug targets, with a specific focus on type 2 diabetes. Dr Altshuler has received numerous awards for his research and clinical activities related to human genetics including, most recently, the Champion of Change: Open Science Award from the White House, the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the American Diabetes Association and the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, among other organizations. He has served on advisory boards for many leading institutions including the National Institutes of Health, The Wellcome Trust, The American Society of Human Genetics, Eisai Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer. Dr Altshuler served on Vertex’s Board of Directors from 2012 – 2014.

Patrick Vallance was President of Pharmaceuticals R&D at GlaxoSmithKline. His talk: ‘Making Medicines for Individuals & Populations’ was recorded at a launch event for the Centre for Personalised Medicine on 7th March 2014.