Professor Owen Sansom

Owen Sansom in the Director of the CRUK Beatson Institute, leads the CRUK Glasgow Cancer Centre and is the Director of the Institute of Cancer Sciences at the University of Glasgow. In 2007 he won the BACR/AstraZeneca Young Scientist Frank Rose Award and in 2012 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was awarded the Cancer Research UK Future Leaders in Cancer Research prize.

In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Owen has published over 275 papers in a research career spanning 20 years. Owen gained his PhD in 2001 working on in vivo models of apoptosis in cancer. Since then, Owen has been instrumental in determining the molecular hallmarks of colorectal cancer (CRC), including showing the roles of the tumour suppressor protein APC and the WNT signalling pathway and the involvement of intestinal stem cells in tumourigenesis.

In 2005, Owen established his own laboratory at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, where he became deputy director in 2010. The Sansom laboratory uses in vivo models and 3D in vitro models to recapitulate CRC and pancreatic cancer to investigate the molecular mechanisms underpinning tumourigenesis and to identify novel drug targets. 

Owen also currently leads an international Colorectal Cancer Stratified Medicine Network, is co-lead and head of the Therapeutic Board for Precision-Panc precision medicine network and leads the preclinical team of the ‘Google Earth’ of cancer cell metabolism mapping Grand Challenge.