Xin Lu is Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Oxford, UK.  She is a leading cancer cell biologist with long-standing research interests in tumour suppression.  She was one of the first researchers to show that the tumour suppressor p53 responds to both oncogene activation and DNA damaging signals and her group was also among the first to demonstrate how to selectively activate p53 to kill cancer cells, through identification and characterization of the evolutionarily conserved ASPP family of proteins. Her laboratory has broad interests in the molecular mechanisms that control cellular plasticity, including how external signals - such as infection - are integrated into the nucleus to achieve target-selective transcription and cell fate determination. Xin Lu also has interests in the deep phenotyping clinical cohorts at high risk of cancer, with an aim to identifying biomarkers and signatures predictive of early stage cancer or recurrence. She is involved in clinical studies on Li Fraumeni Syndrome, Barrett’s oesophagus, and played a leading role in the LUD2015-005 Phase II/III immunochemotherapy oesophageal cancer trial, which identified a novel gene signature and tumour monocyte content as independent predictors of patient response.

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