History
Professor Mitch Dowsett
Professor Mitch Dowsett received his Ph.D. from Chester Beatty Cancer Research Institute at London University. He is currently Head of the Academic Department of Biochemistry at the Royal Marsden Hospital, Professor of Biochemical Endocrinology at the Institute of Cancer Research, and Professor of Translational Research in the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Centre, London.
Professor Dowsett’s research focuses almost exclusively on breast cancer and predominantly on hormonal aspects of the disease and biomarkers of response. He has been closely involved with the clinical development of aromatase inhibitors and the establishment of Ki67 as an intermediate marker of treatment benefit. His work has focused mainly on the assessment of biomarkers in large phase III clinical trials. He has written widely on this, including on the general potential and limitation of such studies.
Professor Dowsett has authored over 500 published papers related to breast cancer, and was the 2007 William L McGuire Memorial Lecturer. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Breast International Group (BIG), and sits on the Executive/Steering Committees of several clinical trials. He chairs the translational research committees for the ATAC and HERA clinical trials and is co-PI of the national POETIC trial of preoperative endocrine therapy.
He is the founding chairman of the NCRI Biomarker and Imaging Clinical Study Group and is a member of the NCRI Breast Cancer Study Group. He was an author of both the UK and the ASCO/CAP guidelines for HER2 diagnostics. He is the international member of the ASCO/CAP Steering Committee for ER/PgR IHC guidelines.
Dr Lesley-Ann Martin
Dr Lesley-Ann Martin received her Ph.D. from Reading University and after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Animal Health, Pirbright with Prof Peter Mertens, joined Prof. Nick Lemoine as a senior research fellow at the ICRF forming part of the team that carried out the first UK breast cancer gene therapy trial.
Lesley-Ann joined Professor Mitch Dowsett’s department in 1999 with the goal of generating in vitro models of endocrine resistant breast cancer. In 2004 Mitch Dowsett and Lesley-Ann joined Breakthrough forming The Molecular Endocrinology Team this was shortly followed by the development of the Translational Research Team in 2006. In 2010 The Molecular Endocrinology and Translation Research Teams joined forces to form the Endocrine Team a concerted effort, to generate increased knowledge on the important mechanisms of response and resistance specifically to oestrogen deprivation and most particularly to AIs by making use of large clinical data sets and in vitro laboratory models for hypothesis driven study.
