Charles Swanton

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. 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.

As of 2018, Swanton has been 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: 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. 2026: The Sjöberg prize.

Personal life