We are delighted to share that Milner Director Professor Sir Tony Kouzarides – a Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Group Leader at the Gurdon Institute – has been awarded a Knighthood for his services to healthcare innovation and delivery.
The honour not only recognizes Tony’s global impact on disease treatment, but the many ways Tony has worked to positively transform how academics interact with healthcare businesses.
Tony’s research group at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, has been studying epigenetic modifications for many years, starting with the identification of the first human enzymes to modify chromatin in 1996. He lab has over 200 publications and close to 96,000 citations.
A cancer gene identified in his lab has been targeted for drug discovery in a collaboration with STORM Therapeutics, a company co-founded by Tony. This drug is currently in clinical trials against cancer in several hospitals in the USA.
Throughout his research career, Tony has been dedicated to the conversion of science into patient benefit. He has achieved this through his own successful entrepreneurial activities and has created novel institutional paradigms that pave the way for others to do the same. Indeed, one example of this is the creation of the Milner Therapeutics Institute (MTI), an affiliated institute with the CRUK Cambridge Centre, which engages researchers with pharmaceutical companies, and nurtures the development of therapeutic start-up companies.
Tony is also founder and director of Cambridge Gravity, an organization for the promotion of entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge, founder and ex-director of the Spanish cancer charity Conquer Cancer (Vencer el Cancer), and is a co-founder of four companies: Abcam plc, Chroma Therapeutics, STORM Therapeutics and VELLOS.
Tony has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), Fellow of the British Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), and a Fellow of the Cyprus Academy of Science. He has won many awards, including the first ever Excellence in Science medal, awarded by the President of Cyprus, which is particularly poignant given that Tony arrived in the UK as a war refugee from Cyprus in 1974.
Tony said: “I am delighted to receive this honour, which reinforces the importance of translating basic research into therapies by engaging academic researchers with healthcare businesses.”
