Justin Stebbing

Professor Justin Stebbing received his training in medicine at Trinity College, University of Oxford where he gained a first-class degree. After completing 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 at The Royal Marsden, St Bartholomew's Hospitals and now through Imperial College and its aligned Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

He has published over 550 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 presenting data at international conferences. His focus at Imperial College is on new therapies in cancer and systemic management of patients with solid malignancies using genomic data. His laboratory work is concentrated on druggable target discovery, biomarkers of response and the role of immunotherapy. The charity Action Against Cancer supports his work.

He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists and sits on the Advisory Boards of a number of international cancer committees, chairing the oversight committee of the Irish Cancer Society. He has published a large body of work on harnessing the immune system to treat cancer using HIV as a model to explain that with the advent of antivirals, AIDS-malignancies have decreased. Justin's team published in Nature Medicine, outlining the groundbreaking discovery of a new cancer-causing gene associated with new mechanisms of cancer drug resistance. Since then his papers include the use of circulating biomarkers, gene regulation and trials of new agents including the clinical use of biosimilars, increasing access to high-value drugs across the developing and developed world by making these biologics cheaper treatments. A review paper on this was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

He was appointed the government's first oncology professor funded by the National Institute for Health Research. In 2016, he was internationally recognised with his appointment as co-Editor-in-Chief of Oncogene and election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

Recently, Stebbing published in the Lancet using artificial intelligence to find a potential new drug to treat the coronavirus. He worked with BenevolentAI to identify Baricitinib as a potential treatment for COVID-19 and this treatment has entered a randomized trial with the NIAID in the US.