Antonis Antoniou

Professor Antoniou is a genetic epidemiologist and has made major contributions to the understanding of the genetic basis of common cancers and the development of cancer risk prediction models.  Using innovative approaches to analyse data from large population-based and family studies, he has provided reliable estimates of cancer risks for carriers of mutations and BRCA1 and BRCA2 that are used every day in the clinic. His work showed that PALB2 was a high-risk breast cancer gene. He leads the coordinating centre of the international Consortium of Modifiers of BRCA1/2 and has demonstrated the importance of genetic modifiers of cancer risk for BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers and that these modifiers lead to clinically important differences in cancer risk. He led the development of the multifactorial BOADICEA model using large-scale multimodal datasets. BOADICEA is used to predict breast and ovarian cancer risks using genetic, lifestyle, hormonal, anthropometric, and imaging risk factors. His team implemented BOADICEA into the CanRisk (www.canrisk.org) online tool used by clinicians across the world to counsel thousands of patients daily, to guide decisions on screening and surgical and medical prevention of disease. CanRisk is endorsed by clinical guidelines in several countries. He currently leads the CanRisk programme of work that aims to enable cancer risk prediction within routine frontline healthcare in the UK; and he is director of the Cancer Research UK, Cancer Data Driven Detection (CD3) initiative.