Sir Richard Peto, FRS
Sir Richard Peto, FRS, will receive the William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award at the 2017 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), to be held December 5–9.
The McGuire Award was established in 1992 to honor William L. McGuire, MD, who, along with Charles A. Coltman, MD, founded SABCS in 1978. The topic of Dr. Peto’s award lecture will be announced at a later date.
Lifetime of Achievement
Dr. Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, is being recognized for his lifetime of achievement in cancer epidemiology and treatment. Well known for his work establishing smoking as a leading cause of cancer—and for predicting that if current global smoking patterns persist, there will be a billion tobacco deaths this century as compared with 100 million this past century—Dr. Peto has also made a significant and lasting impact on the field of breast cancer research.
In 1985, he established the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group (EBCTCG), which regularly brings together detailed data from hundreds of thousands of women enrolled in hundreds of trials to define the effects of widely practicable clinical treatments on long-term survival, showing the extent to which radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and endocrine therapy improve 15-year survival. He was a co-investigator in the influential ATLAS trial, led by Christina Davies, MBBCh, MSc, and presented at SABCS in 2012, which found that 10 years of tamoxifen treatment resulted in better 15-year outcomes than the standard 5 years of treatment.
“Sir Richard’s work has contributed to important progress in many aspects of cancer epidemiology, prevention, and treatment, especially in breast cancer,” said C. Kent Osborne, MD, Director of the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine and Co-Director of SABCS. “Under his leadership, the EBCTCG has analyzed immense amounts of clinical trial data. Their findings have provided crucial information to those of us who treat breast cancer patients. 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. We are proud to celebrate his distinguished career and recognize him with the McGuire Award this year.”
Among many other honors, Dr. Peto is a fellow of The Royal Society of London and a fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy. ■
