Dimitrios Spandidos

Demetrios A. Spandidos is a Greek virologist and cancer researcher. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Crete where he was professor of virology from 1989 till 2015. He is also the founder of Spandidos Publications and the editor-in-chief of all eight of its journals.

Education Spandidos received his bachelor's degree from the University of Thessaloniki in 1971, his PhD from McGill University in 1976, and a DSc from the University of Glasgow in 1989.

Career

From 1976 to 1978, Spandidos worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, working in the laboratory of Louis Siminovitch.

In 1978, Spandidos gave a presentation to a Dana Farber Cancer Institute seminar. In this presentation, Spandidos claimed to have proven that oncogenes were the root cause of all cancers. Robert Weinberg, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was in the audience when Spandidos gave this talk, and later recalled that he had devised what he called "exactly the same" strategy to identify oncogenes in human tumors not long before Spandidos' talk. Spandidos had published these findings in Cell a month prior to Weinberg having his idea, which, like Spandidos' paper, related to transfectable oncogenes.

Spandidos was forced to end his position at the University of Toronto in Siminovitch's laboratory due to accusations of fraud. Two postdocs in Siminovitch lab were unable to reproduce Spandidos' findings, and Spandidos did not present the raw data proving that he was innocent. However, Siminovitch did not initiate an independent investigation and the accusations have never been officially confirmed.

Previous and Present Positions

1972 - 1976 Graduate Student, Department of Biochemistry, McGill University, Montreal, Canada 1977 - 1978 Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada 1978 - 1979 Assistant Professor, Hellenic Anticancer Institute, Athens, Greece 1979 - 1981 Centennial Fellow (MRC Canada), Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, Glasgow, Scotland, UK where he studied the Ras oncogene.

2022 Demetrios Spandidos is elected this year as a new member of Academia Europaea.

Spandidos Publications In 1992, Spandidos established Spandidos Publications, a publisher of scientific journals. It currently publishes twelve journals: International Journal of Molecular Medicine, International Journal of Oncology, Molecular Medicine Reports, Oncology Reports, Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine, Oncology Letters, Biomedical Reports, Molecular and Clinical Oncology, World Academy of Sciences Journal, International Journal of Functional Nutrition, International Journal of Epigenetics and Medicine International Journal. Spandidos is the editor-in-chief of all of them.

Special issues in honor of Spandidos were published in Critical Reviews in Oncogenesis in 2017 and in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine in 2019. EDITORIAL of the International Journal of Oncology for 30 years of progress (1992-2021)

Honours and awards 1989 Corresponding member of the Academia National De Medicina De Buenos Aires, Argentina 2002 Doctor Honoris Causa of "Carol Davila" University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania 2004 Doctor Honoris Causa of "Iuliu Hatieganu" University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 2013 Honorary Professor, Fujian University, P.R. China 2022 Member of the Academia Europaea