Jack Cuzick is director of Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, head of its Centre for Cancer Prevention and John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at Queen Mary, University of London. He holds a PhD in Mathematics and he previously worked at Oxford University and Columbia University, New York. His current interests are in prevention and screening, and particularly their interaction via risk adapted screening. He is Chairman of the International Breast cancer Intervention Study (IBIS) Steering Group and the ATAC adjuvant treatment trial. He has worked extensively in breast cancer and was the first to report the reduction of contralateral tumours in women taking tamoxifen for treatment of early breast cancer, and suggested it might be an indicator of its potential role as a preventive therapy, leading to 4 prevention trials around the world. He has also demonstrated that a change in mammographic breast density during endocrine prevention or adjuvant treatment is a biomarker for its effectiveness. The IBIS-I trial of 7145 high risk women recently reported that 5 years of tamoxifen produces a 30% reduction in breast cancer incidence which persists unabated for at least 20 years. The IBIS-II trial has demonstrated that anastrozole produces a larger 50% reduction, lasting for at least 12 years, but this is only suitable for postmenopausal women. He also has a long standing interest in the use of HPV assays for cervical screening, and conducted the first randomised trial comparing HPV testing to cytology, and carried out several additional studies of triage markers, including genotyping, methylation and viral load. He also designed and participated in the analysis of the landmark trial of once in a lifetime flexible sigmoidoscopy for colorectal cancer screening. Lastly, he has coordinated a retrospective study of biomarkers to predict the outcome of early prostate cancer managed by active surveillance, leading to the widely used cell cycle progression signature marketed as Prolaris by Myriad Genetics. He was awarded CBE in 2017, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Statistical Society.
In 2007 and subsequently, he was chosen by Thompson Scientific as one of the twelve hottest researchers in all of science. He was awarded the CR-UK lifetime achievement award in 2017, the AACR Cancer Prevention Prize in 2012, the CRUK Translational Cancer Research Prize team prize in 2014, Robert Sutherland Award for Excellence in Translational Research (Australia) and the ACS Medal of Honor in 2015. He is the author of more than 650 peer-reviewed papers and has published in all the major medical journals.
