Professor Charles Swanton (UCL Cancer Institute) has been awarded the 2026 Sjöberg Prize for his groundbreaking work on how tumours evolve, helping to explain why cancer treatments sometimes fail and paving the way for more precise, personalised therapies.
The Sjöberg Prize is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in partnership with the Sjöberg Foundation. It recognises scientists who have made decisive contributions to cancer research.
The US$1 million prize money honours Professor Swanton’s research into how tumours change over time, develop resistance to treatment, and spread throughout the body. His work has changed the way the world understands cancer by demonstrating the disease as an evolutionary process.
It has long been known that cancer starts when a cell mutates and begins dividing aggressively, but researchers have not known the details of what happens inside the tumour and how natural selection operates for tumours to evade drugs and the immune system as cancers progress.
Professor Swanton’s research may go some way to explaining why some treatments fail to completely eradicate a cancer. He has also developed a blood test that can, at an early stage, identify cancer patients who are starting to relapse.
Much of his research has been carried out through TRACERx (TRAcking Cancer Evolution through therapy), a major UK-wide study led by Professor Swanton and funded by Cancer Research UK, run by the UCL Cancer Trials Centre, with UCLH as a major recruiting study site.
The project aims to understand how genetic diversity within tumours influences treatment response, relapse and survival, with the goal of developing better diagnostics and more effective, personalised therapies.
Urban Lendahl, secretary of the Sjöberg Prize Committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, describes Professor Swanton’s discoveries as a treasure trove, which can be explored by other researchers who want to improve cancer treatment and diagnostics.
Professor Swanton said: "I hope this prize money is going to allow us to really understand how that very first step in tumour initiation and evolution occurs. If we can understand that process, I hope we can intercept it and prevent it from happening and therefore prevent cancers from emerging."
Alongside his role as a leader at the UCL Cancer Institute, Professor Swanton is Chief Clinician at Cancer Research UK, Royal Society Napier Professor of Cancer, and deputy clinical director at the Francis Crick Institute. He also co-directs CRUK’s Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence and treats patients at UCLH.
Professor Swanton is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Academy of the American Association for Cancer Research. Other international prizes he has won include the Louis-Jeantet Prize 2024 for Translational Medicine, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center’s 2021 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research.
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