Sir Richard Peto Honored with SABCS's 2017 William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award

Sir Richard Peto, FRS

Sir Richard Peto, FRS, a recognized pioneer in epidemiology and health statisticians, will be honored with the William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award at the 2017 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), to be held December 5 to 9 in San Antonio, Texas. The topic of his award lecture will be announced at a later date, according to a press release from SABCS.

The award honors distinguished researchers who have made significant contributions to cancer research. Peto is being recognized for his work establishing the health effects and premature death associated with smoking. He has made significant contributions to the field of breast cancer research and is well known for his work on clinical trials, including the influential ATLAS trial, and a worldwide meta-analysis.

In 1985, he established the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group (EBCTCG), which collects informational data from hundreds of thousands of women enrolled in trials to define the effects of widely practicable clinical treatments on long-term survival. For this meta-analysis, he was made Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1989. He will touch upon the EBCTCG during his lecture.

“Sir Richard’s approach has changed the practice of breast cancer management by highlighting the fact that meta-analysis can correct the errors derived from small studies and help us reach firm conclusions on the benefits of a given therapy,” said C. Kent Osborne, MD, director of the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of SABCS, in a statement. “We are proud to celebrate his distinguished career and recognize him with the McGuire Award this year.”

Currently, Peto is a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and co-director of the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit.

Among many other honors, Peto has won the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, the Lifetime Achievement Prize in 2010, and the Luther L. Terry Award from the American Cancer Society in 2006.

During the symposium, additional awards will be given, including the SABCS 40th Anniversary Award Lecture, which will be given by Richard Pazdur, MD, of the FDA on the past and future of drug development for cancer therapeutics.

The Susan G. Komen Brinker Awards for Scientific Distinction were given to Alan Ashworth, PhD, FRS, for basic science, and to Dennis J. Slamon, MD, PhD, for distinction in clinical research. Ashworth, of the University of California San Francisco Helen Diler Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, will present on the synthetic lethality treatments for patients with cancer. Slamon, of the University of California Los Angeles Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, will give a lecture entitled, “Molecular Diversity of Human Breast Cancer: Biologic and Therapeutic Implications.”

The American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research will be given by Jeffrey M. Rosen, PhD, of the Baylor College of Medicine, who will speak on the importance of preclinical models of breast cancer. Nicholas C. Turner, PhD, FRCP, BM, MA, will be honored during the symposium with the AACR Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer Research. Turner, of the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden, will give a lecture on diversity among patients with breast cancer.