Unravelling the Mysteries of Kidney Cancer - A Journey from Genetics to Immunology

Samra Turajlic is the winner of the 2026 Pezcoller Foundation – EACR Translational Cancer Researcher Award, thanks to her translational studies about melanoma and kidney cancer.

Professor Turajlic is a Clinician Scientist. Her work spans basic, translational and clinical research and she is the Chief Investigator of studies that aim to understand tumour initiation, metastasis and therapy resistance.

Through her research, she has demonstrated that the evolutionary characteristics of cancer can predict the course of the disease in primary RCCs (the most common type of malignant kidney tumor). Her laboratory contributes innovative methods to cancer research and diagnosis, benefiting patients. Her lab contributes novel methods for investigating and diagnosing cancer for patient benefit.

The speaker

Samra Turajlic is a medical oncologist and researcher: she is Chief Investigator of the “Turajlic Lab Cancer Dynamics Laboratory” at the Francis Crick Institute in London, which focuses on understanding how tumors evolve, in addition to working at the Royal Marsden.

She studied at the University of Oxford and then completed her clinical training at University College London Medical School. She obtained her PhD in 2013 from the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

During her PhD, she studied the genetics of melanoma and resistance to targeted therapies, contributing—with one of the first insights—to understanding the triggers of rare melanomas and the mechanism of resistance to BRAF inhibitors.

In 2014, she was awarded a fellowship as a clinical researcher at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, where she began using an evolutionary approach to understanding kidney cancer, reconciling many clinical observations. In 2019, she became an independent Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute and an advanced clinical researcher at CRUK. She is head of the Basic and Translational Research Division of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and project lead for the 100K Genomes Partnership for Melanoma. In addition, since 2024, she has been head of the UK consortium MANIFEST, which aims to discover the factors that determine the response, resistance, and toxicity of immuno-oncology agents. From 2015 to August 2025, she worked as a consultant oncologist at the Royal Marsden, specializing in the treatment of melanoma and kidney cancer. More recently, in September 2025, she was appointed Director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute.