Dr Gary Middleton

Dr Gary Middleton is a Cosultant Medical Oncologist at the Royal Surrey County Hospital and Visiting Senior Fellow, PGMS, University of Surrey. He is R&D Lead for the SWSH Cancer Network and an Executive Board member Surrey & Sussex CLRN. He is a Member of the NCRI Advanced Colorectal Cancer Group and a Member of the NCRI Pancreatic Sub-group. He sits on the NCRI Industry Adoption Panel. He has advisory board membership/Consultative roles for Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lily (he represented the Company at the NICE Appeal Hearings for second line Alimta in non-small cell lung cancer), Glaxo Smith Kline, Roche, Merck, MSD and AZ. He is the Chief Investigator on the NCRI Advanced Pancreatic Cancer Study, TeloVac.  This is an ambitious programme, which plans to enrol 1,100 patients into a randomisation between chemotherapy, sequential and concomitant chemoimmunotherapy using a 16mer peptide vaccine directed against telomerase.  This study is recruiting very well with over 700 patients recruited to date. He is the CI on a randomised NCRI phase II trial of Gemcitabine +/- Vandetanib in pancreatic cancer which has just received FSC/CTAAC approval.  He has also been awarded a CTAAC grant for a randomised phase II trial in colorectal cancer of FOLFIRI +/- AZD7762 a potent checkpoint kinase inhibitor and is submitting a proposal for a randomised phase II with the same drug combined with gemcitabine and carboplatin in small cell lung cancer. All three studies will carry with them translational bolt-ons and he will be the Chief Investigator on all of these programmes. He is Co-applicant on the NCRI PICCOLO Study in second line advanced colorectal cancer, a member of the Trial Management Group of the COUGAR Study and the ET Study and Chair of the Data Monitoring Committee of EXPERT-C. He is currently supervising an MD Fellow working on a large programme investigating the dynamics of a range of immune cell subsets during the course of upper GI and pancreatic cancer, their prognostic and predictive relevance and the effects on them of various therapeutic interventions. MDSCs are a particular focus of attention as is the development of an immunological biomarker panel to predict immunoresponsiveness to therapeutic cancer vaccines. He will be supervising a PhD investigating HOX genes in pancreatic cancer. He is currently setting up a sample bank with an integrated clinical database for proteomic and genomic biomarker work in upper GI cancer which will complement the already successful SUN database at the PGMS, University of Surrey.