Michael Stratton

Education

Stratton was educated at the independent Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School and obtained a medical degree from Brasenose College, Oxford, and Guy's Hospital before training as a histopathologist at the Hammersmith and Maudsley Hospitals in London. He obtained a PhD while working on Medulloblastomas in the molecular biology of cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research.

Career and research

Stratton has held clinical posts at Guy's Hospital, Westminster Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and the Royal Marsden Hospital. He took up a Faculty appointment and now holds a Professorship at the Institute of Cancer Research. He joined the Sanger Institute in 2000 and was promoted to deputy director in 2007. In May 2010, he was appointed director, succeeding Allan Bradley.

Stratton's research interests are in the area of genetics of cancer. In 1994 he assembled a research group that localised BRCA2, a major breast cancer susceptibility gene that repairs chromosomal damage, to chromosome 13. The following year his team identified the gene and, in doing so generated a megabase segment of high-quality human genome sequence. His subsequent work has involved the identification of more moderate cancer susceptibility genes such as CHEK2, ATM and PALB2 each of which play a role in some breast cancers. He has additionally identified genes implicated in the development of skin, testis, colorectal and thyroid cancers, Wilms tumour and Peutz–Jeghers syndrome.

At the announcement of the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000, Stratton discussed using genome sequences to revolutionise cancer treatment. He and Andy Futreal had already initiated the Cancer Genome Project at the Sanger Centre, as it was then known, to use genome-wide analysis to find somatic mutations in human cancers. According to fellow cancer researcher Chris Marshall, doing so prior to the completion of the human genome sequence was an "audacious idea." The aims of the project are to identify new cancer genes, to understand how cancers develop and to study how the structure of genomes influence cancer. In 2002 and 2004, Stratton's team discovered mutations in the BRAF and ERBB2 genes in approximately 60 per cent of malignant melanomas and 4 per cent of non-small-cell lung cancers respectively.

In 2009, Stratton and colleagues reported the first complete cancer genomes, from a lung tumour and a melanoma. They also analysed the genomes from 24 different breast tumours and found a diversity of DNA abnormalities, indicating that cancers can be divided in more subcategories than previously thought. Stratton's team maintain the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC) database, a set of online resources available to the scientific community. He is also one of the lead researchers in the International Cancer Genome Project, a £600 million, multi-national project to sequence 25 000 cancer genomes, from 50 different types of cancer. Stratton's research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council (MRC).

Awards and honours

Stratton was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 1999, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008, elected to EMBO Membership in 2009 and was awarded the Lila Gruber Cancer Research Award in 2010. He was knighted in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to medical science. His nomination for the Royal Society reads: