Christopher Sweeney

Christopher Sweeney, MBBS is Director of the South Australian Immunogenomics Cancer Institute (SAiGENCI) at the University of Adelaide and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, where he spent the majority of his career leading the prostate cancer clinical and translational research program. Prof. Sweeney is internationally recognized as the architect of the treatment intensification paradigm for metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer, having led two of the most pivotal trials in the history of mHSPC management. He was the principal investigator of the landmark CHAARTED trial (NEJM 2015), an ECOG-ACRIN cooperative group study that randomized 790 men with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer to docetaxel plus ADT versus ADT alone, demonstrating a 13.6-month OS improvement (57.6 vs. 44.0 months; HR 0.61; p<0.001) in the high-volume disease subgroup — establishing docetaxel as the first systemic agent proven to improve survival when added to ADT in mHSPC. He subsequently led the ENZAMET trial (NEJM 2019), which demonstrated enzalutamide plus ADT significantly improved OS versus ADT with non-steroidal antiandrogen in mHSPC (HR 0.67; p=0.002). Together, CHAARTED and ENZAMET made Prof. Sweeney the only clinical investigator to have led phase III mHSPC trials that established both chemotherapy intensification and AR-targeted agent intensification as separate standards of care. He has additionally conducted foundational genomic research on CDK12-mutated prostate cancer as a distinct subtype sensitive to immunotherapy, on clonal evolution under treatment in mHSPC, and on biomarkers predictive of benefit from treatment intensification.