TurajlicSamra The Francis Crick InstituteUnited Kingdom

Prof Turajlic is a Clinician Scientist. She serves as a Consultant Medical Oncologist at the Royal Marsden sub-specialising in the treatment of melanoma and kidney cancer since 2015. Her PhD research was in the field of melanoma genetics and targeted therapy resistance, where she contributed one of the first insights into the drivers of rare melanomas and the mechanism of resistance to BRAF inhibitors. In 2014, she was awarded a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist Fellowship at the CRUK London Research Institute when she began applying an evolutionary framework to understanding renal cancer reconciling many clinical observations. She became an independent Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in 2019 and a CRUK Advanced Clinician Scientist. Prof Turajlic’s work spans basic, translational and clinical research and she is the Chief Investigator of studies that aim to understand tumour initiation, metastasis and therapy resistance. Her lab contributes novel methods for investigating and diagnosing cancer for patient benefit. She is Faculty Lead for Basic and Translational Research of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO), and the lead of the 100K Genomes Project Partnership for Melanoma. Prof Turajlic is on the American Association for Cancer Research Cancer Data Science Task Force and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gustave Roussy (France), Memorial Sloan Kettering Kidney Cancer SPORE (US), MD Anderson's TRACTION Platform (US), the Institute Jules Border (Belgium), Systems Biology Ireland Institute, and Genomics England (UK). She is a member of the WHO pathology working group, NCRI Bladder and Renal Cancer Clinical Studies Group, Uveal Melanoma Guidelines Group, ESMO Faculty member for genitourinary cancers and immunotherapy. She is a Trustee of patient advocacy groups, Kidney Cancer Support Network and Melanoma Focus and a Senior Editor at Macmillan Cancer Support. She receives research funding from Melanoma Research Alliance, National Institute for Health, and Department of Defence (all US), and CRUK, the MRC, Rosetrees Trust, the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, the RMH/ICR Biomedical Research Centre (all UK), as well as industry support from Roche and BMS. In 2022 she was awarded the ESMO Translational Research Award for the work impacting cancer science and translational medicine. She is a recipient of the UK COVID Cancer pandemic prize for her work on cancer and COVID-19 which informed health policy for cancer patients. Since 2024 she leads the UK consortium MANIFEST which aims to uncover the drivers of response, resistance, and toxicity of immune-oncology agents (https://www.manifest-io.org.uk/).