Royal Society of Medicine biography
Kevin Harrington is an NIHR Senior Investigator and Head of the Division of Radiotherapy and Imaging at The Institute of Cancer Research/Royal Marsden Hospital. He is the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre lead for the Targeted Physical Therapies theme, Director for the ICR/RM CRUK RadNet Centre of Excellence, Chair of the CRUK Advanced Radiotherapy Network (ART-NET) Network Accelerator and an Executive Board member for the CRUK ICR/Imperial Major Centre for Convergence Science. He is also an Honorary Consultant Clinical Oncologist at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and at St George’s Hospital, specialising in developing new treatments with a specific focus on head and neck cancer (HNC). His twin research interests are oncolytic virotherapy/immunotherapy and targeted radiation sensitisers. In the field of oncolytic virotherapy, he has led in developing DNA (HSV [talimogene laherparepvec, RP1, RP2 and RP3 viruses] and vaccinia virus) and RNA viruses (Reovirus type 3 Dearing, coxsackievirus A21, Maraba and Newcastle Disease virus). His research interests in immunotherapy include immune checkpoint inhibitors (PD-1, PD-L1, LAG-3, CTLA-4, TIGIT inhibitors) and innate immune activators (e.g. cyclic dinucleotide (CDN) and non-CDN STING agonists). He serves on Steering Committees and Scientific Advisory Boards that have guided the development of trials of immune checkpoint inhibitors in head and neck cancer (including Keynote-040, -048, -412, -689, CheckMate-141, -651, 714, Kestrel, Javelin-100). He has been the Principal Investigator of multiple phase I, II and III studies of novel agents in HNC. He leads a programme of pre-clinical and clinical research in targeted radiosensitisers (Chk1i, HSP90i, ATRi), including the first-in-man phase I PATRIOT study of the ATR inhibitor, AZD6738.