Justin Stebbing Biography
Professor Justin Stebbing is Professor of Cancer Medicine and Oncology, Consultant Oncologist, Imperial College and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Professor Justin Stebbing trained in medicine at Trinity College, University of Oxford. After completion of junior doctor posts in Oxford, he undertook training and a residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US, returning to London to continue his career in oncology at The Royal Marsden and St Bartholomew’s Hospitals and now through Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Professor Justin Stebbing specialises in a range of malignancies, their treatment with immunotherapy (breast, GI and lung and clinical trials), having originally trained in medicine at Trinity College Oxford, where he gained a first class degree. After completion of junior doctor posts in Oxford, he undertook training and a residency programme at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US, returning to London to continue his career in oncology at The Royal Marsden and then St Bartholomew’s Hospitals. Professor Stebbing’s original PhD research investigated the interplay between the immune system and cancer; he was appointed a senior lecturer in 2007, and a Professor in 2009.
Professor Justin Stebbing has published over 600 peer-reviewed papers in journals such as the Lancet, New England Journal, Blood, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Annals of Internal Medicine, as well as writing regularly for national newspapers and presenting new data on optimal cancer therapies at the major international conferences. His focus at Imperial is on new therapies in cancer, and the systemic management of patients with solid malignancies including a number of new biomarker-based approaches, with an emphasis on circulating tumour cells and cell free DNA. His laboratory work is concentrated on new druggable target discovery and gene regulation examining the role of non-coding RNAs in stem cells. The charity Action Against Cancer www.aacancer.org has been set up to support Justin’s work which concentrates on drug development and has the ambitious goal of developing cures.
Professor Justin Stebbing
Professor Justin Stebbing is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the American Board of Internal Medicine and the Royal College of Pathologists, and sits on the advisory Boards of a number of international cancer committees. He chairs the World Vaccine Congress and the Irish Cancer Society oversight committee and is on the editorial board of a number of world leading general medical and cancer journals such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology and the Lancet Oncology; he was awarded the Silvia Lawler prize in 2015. Recently, Justin’s team published in Nature Medicine the discovery of a new cancer-causing gene which we have now implicated in breast, gastro-intestinal, lung and other solid tumours. The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) awarded Justin Stebbing its first translational research professorship in oncology, aiming to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the patient to ensure therapy is personalised. The focus of this is understanding why some patients with cancer relapse, and developing a program to reverse this and prevent it. With the excellent research record we have at Imperial College London and the clinical expertise from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, we believe we are ideally placed to achieve this.
Professor Justin Stebbing has an extensive clinical practice and links this to a wide number of translational research studies and immunotherapy trials including recent biosimilar studies. In 2016 Justin was internationally recognised with his appointment as Editor-in-Chief of Oncogene (Springer Nature’s foremost cancer journal) and election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
Justin Stebbing Age
Professor Justin Stebbing was born on 21st January, 1971.
Justin Stebbing Married – Justin Stebbing Wife
This information will be updated.
Justin Stebbing Interview on the new experimental therapy, used by an American team of doctors as part of research of a new method to fight cancer
Source: sputniknews.com
How significant of a trial was this?
Justin Stebbing: Statistically advances in medicine, science and patient care occur in small steps; so in breast cancer, for example, it’s not just about better surgery or chemotherapy, it’s about better surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, hormonal therapy, targeted therapy, anti-body therapy and in some cases immunotherapy, but in my career as we try to personalize medicine, which means treating the right person at the right time with the right drugs and the right tumor, as we try to make medicine individual we’re finding that immunotherapy is really a massive step forward. Now this approach … is not especially new and certainly in the clinic I have dozens of patients that have been given three months to live that respond exceptionally well to unconventional treatment offered and all their tumors disappear, but I would never say that those individuals, those women with breast cancer, are cured, so we have to be very careful using the word cure, the only definition of the word cure that works for me is living till old age and dying of something else, having said that, this approach using T cells from the patient’s own tumors, expanding certain tumor killing T cells, we’re infusing them into the patient and seeing disappearance of tumors is a very promising approach, particularly in people that have exhausted conventional therapeutic options, but one patient is not enough to give us conclusions, we need to see results in hundreds of patients and results in clinical trials because often in early drug development, in early therapy development, we will see very, very impressive responses, but when we study these in larger numbers of people it’s less impressive, so what I’d like to know here is how long will her remission last for and what future treatment options are there, if the remission is lifelong then that is a cure, but I think that is very, very unlikely.
Of course this treatment does remain experimental and will involve a lot more work, but can you give us an idea of how this particular therapy actually works? I understand that the patient’s tumor is genetically analyzed and there seems to be very difficult process whereby they identify some changes that might make the cancer visible to the immune system, in this particular patient out of 62 genetic abnormalities in the patient only four of them were potential lines of attack, can you explain what this is all about?
Justin Stebbing: So I think of a cancer cell like a map, one cell like a map and what we’re trying to work out in the map is which towns or cities are not working properly and then we make bombs and missiles to those towns and cities, the problem is we don’t know which towns and cities are controlling the particular cell and that’s why they only found four, what we call driving mutations as opposed to passenger mutations, but in this case a fresh sample, and a large part of the patients tumor is taken, and the tumor is sequenced so we can understand the bits that are most likely to respond to the immune system; now a lot of cancer is devoted to hiding itself from the immune system, but where it’s different is we take out the T cells and we magnify and expand the T cell that attack the tumor and that are able to overcome the way cancer cells hide from the immune system; and in doing so, in achieving this and then reinfusing them back into the patient we can actually overcome the cancer’s natural resistance mechanisms. We have to give the patients chemotherapy anyway to ablate their own immune systems, not on a high dose, actually on a low dose, but it’s a very promising approach because you’re using, as opposed to chemotherapy that killed rapidly dividing cells and any rapidly dividing cells, you’re using the patient’s own immune system, harnessing it to kill cancer, so your own immune system is performing a biopsy of the cancer every second of the day, your own immune system is personalized, it’s the ultimate personalized medicine because it’s your own, so by using that we can actually make huge strides in treating patients with cancer and harnessing patients’ immune systems to kill cancer.