Justin Stebbing

Justin Stebbing is editor-in-chief of ''Nature''’s cancer journal ''Oncogene'', a visiting Professor of Cancer Medicine and Oncology at Imperial College, London and a Professor of Biomedical Sciences a
ARU, Cambridge
He works at th
Phoenix Hospital Group
in London to provide medical services to patients for the management of cancer, in person and remotely. He specialises in a range of solid malignancies (breast, GI, lung, others) including difficult cases with few conventional options and has published over 700 papers, the majority regarding new therapeutic and translational approaches including use of immunotherapies in clinical trials, many in the world's best journals.

Early life and education

He graduated with a first class degree from Trinity College, Oxford. After completion of junior doctor positions in Oxford, he trained as on the 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. Justin's original PhD research investigated the interplay between the immune system and cancer including the role of viruses here. In 2007 he was appointed a senior lecturer, and then in 2009 a full professor, at Imperial College London. In 2011, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) awarded Justin Stebbing its first Translational Professorship in Oncology, working on overcoming treatment resistance and new targeted precision medicine approaches.

Cancer research

He has published over 700 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals and has an h-index of 88 according to Google Scholar. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Oncogene a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Royal College of Pathologists. The charity Action Against Cancer was set up to support Justin's work which concentrates on drug development and has the ambitious goal of developing cures. In cancer, some of his most cited papers include the discovery of the role of the oncogene LMTK3 across malignancies, the network of microRNAs induced by the estrogen receptor, and extensive work on HIV and AIDS cancers. He has undertaken extensive work on biosimilars, cheaper versions of expensive biologic drugs designed to democratise access to these around the world, now with long term outcomes data. In 2023, new data his team published has shown the importance of genomics in normal tissues, and the mechanism by which both age and pregnancy contribute to changes in DNA, some of which can lead to cancer, highlighted as one of Nature Communications most important papers, and widely publicised in the news.

COVID-19 research

Professor Justin Stebbing made a global contribution to millions of lives by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to identify baricitinib as a drug for the treatment of COVID-19 in early 2020, papers in the Lancet and Lancet Infectious Diseases that are now cited thousands of times. Uniquely this has both antiviral and anti-cytokine properties as confirmed by subsequent mechanistic laboratory work. He led many of the global studies that showed that the drug reduced mortality in COVID-19 hospitalized patients with pneumonia, which led to the drug being authorised by the US Food and Drug Administration in October 2020 as an Emergency Use Authorization at first in combination with remdesivir, then alone. Much of this work is summarized by editorials he wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet Respiratory Medicine which describe this further. The book, ‘Witness to COVID, 2020’ was written by Justin Stebbing describing its discovery, trials, studies and approval, also highlighted in news outlets such as The New York Times. In January 2022, following Professor Stebbing's pivotal original papers and the subsequent global trials, the World Health Organization placed baricitinib at the top of its evidence base to treat COVID-19, giving it its highest recommendation. This has also been made free to countries around the world as they have struggled with numbers of patients, considering it is a simple once daily tablet with few drug-drug interactions, side effects, has dose flexibility, a short half-life and is cheap as his work here has outlined. Based on Prof Stebbing's original AI hypothesis, following the success of the clinical trials including RECOVERY, the US FDA gave baricitinib an unconditional approval, the first immunomodulatory treatment for COVID-19. Separately, Professor Stebbing was also investigated by the General Medical Council over allegations that he failed to provide adequate care to eleven patients with no further options who he had cared for between 2014 and 2017 and he returned to unrestricted practice in October 2022 after a suspension earlier that year.

Other work

Professor Stebbing has worked on neurological therapies for patients with unmet medical needs who are treatment resistant or unresponsive to other existing medications. He has combined his medical career with investing, and he has worked with Atticus Capital, Lansdowne Partners, Vitruvian Partners and Chaired the Board of BB Healthcare Trust. He is actively engaged with a number of companies, is senior oncology advisor t
Clinical ink
and chairs th
ZephyrAI
scientific advisory board.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stebbing, Justin
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
Alumni of Trinity College, Oxford
Alumni of Imperial College London
Academics of Imperial College London
Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians
Fellows of the Royal College of Pathologists
British oncologists
NIHR Research Professors