Nick La Thangue is Professor of Cancer Biology at the University of Oxford, has had a distinguished career, initially at the MRC’s National Institute for Medical Research and the University of Glasgow, and more recently University of Oxford where he has gone on to build an Institute of Cancer Medicine in partnership with clinical and scientific colleagues. He has made key contributions to our knowledge of cancer cell growth, investigating the role of oncogenes and tumour suppressors, in particular, the regulatory interaction between the E2F family of transcription factors and the pRb retinoblastoma tumour suppressor. These studies led to a hypothesis explaining how pRb accomplishes its tumour suppressor activity by negative regulation of E2F activity which has subsequently been validated. In parallel, studies on the p53 tumour suppressor have uncovered new pathways of control that regulate the cellular stress response. In recent years he has initiated a large cancer drug discovery programme which has included clinical trials of patients with diverse tumours using a novel histone deacetylase inhibitor, co-developed in his laboratory.