Charles Rodolphe Brupbacher Foundation

Laurence Zitvogel

Research Director, INSERM U1015, Gustave Roussy

Immunologist who showed that the gut microbiome shapes responses to immunotherapy and chemotherapy.

Isolated the first blood stem cells and discovered the 'don't eat me' signal CD47 on cancer cells.

Bert Vogelstein

Clayton Professor of Oncology; Co-Director, Ludwig Center; HHMI Investigator

Bert Vogelstein is the most-cited scientist in cancer genetics: he mapped how colorectal cancer develops and founded the field of cancer genome sequencing and blood-based detection.

Epidemiologist who quantified how smoking kills and invented the meta-analysis methods that established adjuvant cancer therapy.

Colombian epidemiologist whose IARC studies proved HPV causes cervical cancer and identified the types the vaccines target.

Robert D. Schreiber

Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Distinguished Professor; Director, Bursky Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs

Proposed cancer immunoediting and showed neoantigens are the targets of checkpoint immunotherapy.

Brian Druker

Physician-scientist who brought imatinib to patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia

He pushed a shelved kinase inhibitor through the laboratory and into a 1998 trial when few believed a targeted pill could work. Imatinib made chronic myeloid leukaemia a disease people live with, and became the model for targeted therapy.

Harald zur Hausen

Virologist who showed that human papillomavirus causes cervical cancer

Against the consensus that herpes was to blame, he proposed in 1976 that papillomaviruses cause cervical cancer and isolated HPV16 and HPV18 from tumours in 1983-84, making vaccination and HPV testing possible. Nobel Prize 2008.