Douglas Hanahan
2025 Pezcoller Foundation – AACR International Award
for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research Winner
Dr. Hanahan has been awarded for his fundamental discoveries in cancer research, which allowed several clinical applications.
Hanahan is Distinguished Scholar at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (Lausanne, Switzerland). He is being recognized for his fundamental discoveries in cancer research that have had far-reaching translational impact.
Through the generation and characterization of innovative mouse models, he defined multi-step tumorigenesis by uncovering the molecular mechanisms required to drive cancer growth and helped establish the principle that malignant traits in cancer are conferred by cooperative interactions between cancer cells and co-opted host cells recruited into the tumor microenvironment.
His innovative and multidisciplinary work has resulted in new therapeutic strategies and new drugs with multiple targets (against cancer cells and collaborating cells).
Notably, Hanahan formulated, together with Robert Weinberg, PhD, the “Hallmarks of Cancer” a logical framework for rationalizing the vast complexity of cancer that continues to evolve and resonate broadly with the entire cancer research community.
Dr. Douglas Hanahan, the winner of The 2025 Pezcoller Foundation – AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research
WHO IS DOUGLAS HANAHAN?
- Born in 1951 in Seattle (Washington, USA)
- 1976: Master Degree in Physics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- 1983: PhD in Bio-Pysics at Harvard (Boston, Massachusetts)
- 1983-1988: he was researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (New York)
- 1988-2009: he was professor at UCSF (University of California San Francisco)
- 2009-2020: he was Director of ISREC (Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research) and Medical Oncology Professor at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) at Lausanne, (Switzerland).
- He has been Distinguished Scholar at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Lausanne, Switzerland.
- In 2000 (and after in 2011, 2022, 2024) he published “The Hallmarks of Cancer” a logical framework for rationalizing the vast complexity of cancer that continues to evolve and resonate broadly with the entire cancer research community.
He will be announced as the winner on Sunday, April 27, 2025 at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago, Illinois, USA, at the presence of more than 25,000 researchers from around the world. He will also held the Pezcoller Lecture on that occasion
The traditional Award Ceremony (€75,000) will be held on Saturday, May 17, 2025 at 10 a.m. at the Teatro Sociale in Trento, in the presence of the authorities and representatives of the Trentino scientific, academic and business community.
On the two days preceding the ceremony, Prof. Hanahan will give two scientific lectures: at the University of Trento and at the University of Padua.