Professor Charles Swanton has been announced as the winner of the European Association for Cancer Research’s Mike Price Gold Medal Award, a biennial award recognising a senior researcher who has made exceptional contributions to the progress of cancer research in Europe.
The 2026 award will be presented at the Annual Congress of the European Association for Cancer Research, EACR 2026 in Budapest in June 2026, where Professor Swanton will present the Keynote Award Lecture.
We interviewed Professor Swanton recently for The Cancer Podcast – listen to the fascinating episode where he discusses his research interests, the evolution of the field and how he turned round his failing PhD: Charlie Swanton on perseverance, scientific change and asking questions: Episode 21 of The Cancer Researcher Podcast
About the winner
Charles Swanton completed his MBPhD training in 1999 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories and Cancer Research UK clinician scientist/medical oncology training in 2008. He is a senior Principal Investigator of the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory, and Deputy clinical director at the Francis Crick Institute. He combines his research with clinical duties at UCLH as a Consultant thoracic oncologist, focused on how tumours evolve over space and time. His research 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. Charles is chief investigator of TRACERx, a lung cancer evolutionary study, the national PEACE autopsy program, and the TRACERx EVO study.
Charles was made Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in April 2011, appointed Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015, awarded the Royal Society Napier Professorship in Cancer in 2016, appointed Cancer Research UK’s Chief Clinician in 2017, elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018, Fellow of the Academy of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2020, and appointed Deputy Clinical Director of the Francis Crick Institute in 2023. He is an editorial board member of Cell, Plos Medicine, Cancer Discovery and Annals of Oncology and an advisory board member for Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology and Cancer Cell. In 2016 he co-founded Achilles Therapeutics, a UCL/CRUK/Francis Crick Institute spin-out company, assessing the efficacy of T cells targeting clonal neoantigens.
Charles has been awarded several prizes including the Stand up to Cancer Translational Cancer Research Prize (2015), GlaxoSmithkline Biochemical Society Prize (2016), San Salvatore prize for Cancer Research (2017) and the Ellison-Cliffe Medal, Royal Society of Medicine (2017), recipient of the Gordon Hamilton Fairley Medal (2018), Massachusetts General Hospital, Jonathan Kraft Prize for Excellence in Cancer Research (May 2018), the ESMO Award for Translational Cancer Research (2019), Addario Lung Cancer Foundation Award and Lectureship, International Lung Cancer Congress (July 2020), the Weizmann Institute Sergio Lombroso Award in Cancer Research (2021), International Society of Liquid Biopsy (ISLB) Research Award (2021), the Memorial Sloan Kettering Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research (2021), UCLH Celebrating Excellence Award for Contribution to World Class Research (2022), Inductee to OncLive’s Giants of Cancer Care awards program (2023), SpringerNature CDD Award (2023), the Jeantet-Collen Prize for Translational Medicine (2024), and the Gustave Roussy Prize (2025). In 2025, he was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, recognising his contributions to understanding tumour evolution and advancing translational cancer research.
More about the Award
The Mike Price Gold Medal Award was created in 2012 in memory of Dr. Mike Price, Secretary General of the EACR for 21 years, who died of cancer in 2000. Mike Price was an excellent educator and countless students benefitted from his enthusiasm and understanding. Among many initiatives, he was instrumental in setting up the EACR Travel Fellowship programme which continues to give early career scientists the opportunity to visit and train in centres of excellence throughout Europe and beyond.
Previous winners of the award include Mariano Barbacid, Pier Giuseppe Pelicci, Karen Vousden, Michael Stratton, Harald zur Hausen and José Baselga.
