Charles Swanton

Charles Swanton FRS FMedSci FRCP PhD is Chief Clinician at Cancer Research UK, Group Leader of the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, and Professor at University College London. He is among the most celebrated cancer biologists of his generation, best known for leading the TRACERx (Tracking Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Evolution Through Therapy) study — a landmark multi-regional sequencing programme that has fundamentally reshaped understanding of intratumour heterogeneity, cancer evolution, and the determinants of metastasis and immune evasion. TRACERx demonstrated that most somatic mutations in lung cancer are subclonal and unique to individual tumour regions, explaining treatment failure and immune editing. Swanton's group characterised the role of APOBEC3A/B cytidine deaminases as major mutational processes driving subclonal diversification in multiple cancer types and showed that chromosomal instability (CIN) generates kataegis and complex rearrangements that fuel tumour evolution. He pioneered the use of multiregion WES and circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) to track cancer evolution non-invasively, enabling early detection and monitoring of treatment resistance. Swanton was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 and has received numerous major honours including the Brupbacher Prize, the Helmholtz International Fellow Award, and a knighthood (Sir Charles Swanton as of 2023).