Ketan Patel

Professor Patel was appointed as CRUK’s Chief Scientist in October 2022. He provides scientific leadership to the charity’s ambitions, working with their research community to deliver their research strategy which focuses on the importance of discovery science to unlock new and better ways to beat cancer.

He is Director of the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit at the University of Oxford. Prior to this, he was a tenured principal investigator at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, and Professor for molecular medicine and stem cell genomics at the University of Cambridge.

Professor Patel trained in medicine in London, and his postdoctoral research led to the discovery that BRCA2 works by repairing damaged DNA.

His subsequent work has remained focussed on DNA damage, and specifically on how living cells repair DNA crosslinks. These crosslinks can be exploited to kill cancer cells, for example the drug cisplatin causes crosslinking in cancer cells, but they can also occur naturally. Specific defects in the molecular machinery that repairs DNA crosslinking is associated with the illness Fanconi anaemia. KJ’s recent work has shown that metabolism releases aldehydes that are a potent source of such endogenous DNA damage.

Cancer Research UK has funded Professor Patel’s work in the past, including his research into cancer cachexia, the debilitating wasting condition many people with cancer experience in the later stages of their disease, which people still don’t fully understand. His findings have also contributed to the organisation's improved understanding of what drives the development of cancer, such as how alcohol exposure can cause cancer, opening up new opportunities for prevention, detection and treatment.

Professor Patel is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and Academy of Medical Sciences UK and is also a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation.