Robert Charles Swanton is a British physician scientist specialising in oncology and cancer research. Swanton is a senior group leader at London's Francis Crick Institute, Royal Society Napier Professor in Cancer and thoracic medical oncologist at University College London and University College London Hospitals, co-director of the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence, and Chief Clinician of Cancer Research UK. He has served on the Novartis Board of Directors since 2026.
Early life and education
Swanton was born in Poole, Dorset. As of 2017, his father Robert Howard Swanton (MD, FRCP) was a consultant cardiologist at UCL.
Swanton was educated at St Paul's School, London and completed his PhD in 1999 at what was then the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories (now the Francis Crick Institute) and his Cancer Research UK clinician scientist/medical oncology training in 2008.
Career
Swanton has combined his laboratory research with clinical duties as co-director of the CRUK Lung Cancer Centre, focussed on how tumours evolve over space and time. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: He has helped to define the branched evolutionary histories of solid tumours, 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.
From 2018 - 2025, Swanton was a co-founder of Achilles Therapeutics with Sergio Quezada, Karl Peggs and Mark Lowdell. Achilles Therapeutics is a UCL/CRUK and Francis Crick Institute biotechnology company funded by Syncona that develops adoptive T cell therapies targeting clonal/truncal neo-antigens present in every tumour cell to limit drug resistance and tumour evolution.
Awards and honours 1997: Imperial Cancer Research Fund's (ICRF) Pontecorvo PhD thesis prize 2011: Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP) 2014: Jeremy Jass Prize in pathology 2015: Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) 2015: Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize 2016: Glaxo Smithkline Biochemical Society Prize 2016: San Salvatore prize for Cancer Research 2017: CRUK Translational Research Prize in 2017, 2017: EMBO Member in 2017 2017: Ellison-Cliffe Medal by the Royal Society of Medicine 2018: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) 2018: Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Centre Kraft Prize 2018: Gordon Hamilton Fairley Medal and Lecture 2019: ESMO Translational Research Award 2020: Addario Lung Cancer Foundation Award and Lecture 2021: Weizmann Institute - Sergio Lambroso Award in Cancer Research 2021: Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research 2024: Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine.Louis-Jeantet Prize 2024 2026: The Sjöberg prize.
Personal life
References