Sir Harpal Kumar FMedSci

Harpal Kumar was welcomed to the Academy of Medical Sciences as an Honorary Fellow in 2018, in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to cancer research, and for promoting the charity sector as a driving force for change.

Harpal has cited as one of the proudest moments in his career, the announcement, in 2014, that for the first time ever, as many people in the UK were surviving cancer – for at least 10 years - as were dying from it. He had been Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK (CRUK) for seven years and his drive and determination were undoubtedly pivotal in shaping the organisation into a force that could imagine, and then support, such progress.

Just a year earlier, when asked in an interview with the Guardian newspaper what he would tell his former self, he replied “to be even more ambitious, because the only thing holding us back is ourselves.”

Harpal’s parents were Sikh refugees who fled Pakistan to India, and he spent his childhood in London, helping his father develop his grocery store business. A studious youth with a strong family work ethic, he made a successful early academic start at Latymer Upper School, and then struggled to choose between medicine and engineering. A National Engineering Scholarship and sponsorship from the UK Atomic Energy Authority tipped the balance and he went to Cambridge University to study chemical engineering. After his Masters, he was approached by the management consultancy McKinsey & Co who sponsored him to go to Harvard Business School where he gained an MBA as a Baker Scholar.

Working with a biotech company while at Harvard revived Harpal’s interest in medicine, and he chose to focus on McKinsey’s healthcare clients once based back in London, working with pharmaceutical clients and academic medical centres. A pro bono role advising the Papworth Trust, a charity pioneering rehabilitation services for people with acquired and congenital disabilities, saw him setting out an ambitious turnaround plan at a time when they were struggling. Within a week of presenting to their chair, Harpal received a call offering him the job as the Trust’s Chief Executive, to implement the plans he had recommended. At only 27 years old, Harpal was leading a multi-million-pound charity with more than 500 staff.

After four and a half years at the Trust, during which time Harpal stabilised their losses and essentially rebuilt the charity, he founded a medical device company - Nexan Group PLC - which developed ambulatory physiological monitoring technology for clinical trials and diagnostic devices for conditions such as sleep apnoea for those with heart failure. Under his leadership, Nexan made particular strides in the US market, where it chose to centralise its efforts. Harpal was subsequently lured back to the UK voluntary sector.

In 2002, CRUK had just been formed by the merger of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and Cancer Research Campaign, and was seeking an entrepreneurial leader to oversee the merger of two commercial subsidiaries.

While Chief Executive of Cancer Research Technology Ltd, Harpal also became the charity’s Chief Operating Officer, and he was appointed its Chief Executive in 2007, going on to lead it through seismic change.

Although Harpal recognised CRUK as one of the best scientific organisations in the world, he felt its roots were too academic, while, as he said “…the metrics are not just about publications, they’re about stopping people dying from cancer.”

His tenure at CRUK saw a huge cultural shift alongside successful commercial deals, such as the licensing of new drugs to pharmaceutical companies. With dynamic new branding, the charity’s income trebled; while pursuing an agenda which maintained outstanding fundamental discovery science, it used its additional income to increase its focus on translating scientific advances into patient benefit.

Under Harpal’s leadership, CRUK worked with Sir Mike Richards to create a new national mission on early diagnosis, drove critical prevention efforts through tobacco legislation, such as the ban on smoking in public places, increased investment to tackle hard-to-treat cancers and played a leading role in the improvement of cancer services across the country. And Harpal, and CRUK, helped to change the culture around cancer.

By challenging and changing the language used to discuss the disease and through driving large-scale fundraising events such as Race for Life, which now celebrate surviving patients as well as commemorating those who have died, public attitudes to the disease have changed dramatically.

Harpal also steered CRUK to fund some big, bold new initiatives, including cancer research centres across the UK, which he described as “big constellations bringing universities and the NHS together with us to really shift how we thought about cancer treatment and diagnosis.” And working with Sir Keith Peters, who led the MRC National Institute for Medical Research, Harpal was one of the instigators of the creation of the Francis Crick Institute.

Harpal and Sir Keith saw an opportunity to combine their respective organisations to create a world-leading research institute in the heart of London. Partnering also with the Wellcome Trust and three leading London universities, Harpal sat on the Institute’s initial Steering Group and was then a Trustee until 2018, guiding this flagship of the UK’s biomedical research capability, working on conditions including heart disease, stroke, infection and neurodegenerative diseases as well as cancer.

In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron, and the CEO of NHS England, Simon Stevens, commissioned Harpal to devise a new National Cancer Strategy. The first time this had been done from outside government or the NHS, the request reflected the high esteem in which CRUK, and Harpal, were held. While the plan itself ran to 2020, its successor, the NHS Long Term Plan, kept the core of Harpal’s strategy very much at its heart.

Harpal has received Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow, and the Institute of Cancer Research and, in 2016, was knighted for services to cancer research.

In 2018, after 11 years as CRUK’s CEO, he left to join Johnson & Johnson as Senior Vice President and Head of Innovation for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). In so doing, he explained that his move from the voluntary sector back to the private reflected that he sees himself not as a “voluntary sector person”, but as “someone who wants to do something about health.” While at Johnson & Johnson, Harpal presided over a portfolio of co-investments and collaborations, significantly growing the company’s networks within EMEA.

In April 2020, GRAIL, Inc., a healthcare company whose mission is to detect cancer early, announced that Harpal had been appointed to a new role, as President of its biopharma business and responsible for leading their entry into and growth within Europe and their global collaborations with pharmaceutical companies. GRAIL’s lead in developing a blood test, Galleri, for more than 50 different cancer types has recently received intense interest, and three large-scale trials are taking place in the UK under Harpal’s leadership.

Available commercially in the US, the NHS-Galleri randomised controlled clinical trial, which enrolled more than 140,000 people in just over 10 months, seeks to demonstrate that the Galleri test works at population scale. As Amanda Pritchard said at the recent NHS Confed meeting: “If provisional results prove successful, we will be rolling out the test to an extra one million people across the country from next summer, with the aim of diagnosing thousands more people with cancer at an earlier stage. Lives are saved when cancers are caught early and this test has the potential to transform cancer care forever.”

With our lifetime risk of developing cancer being I in 2, Harpal’s role in driving such innovation forward could, yet again, be game-changing for us all.