Prof. Justin Stebbing serves as Medical Advisor at SCALE Life Science.

Justin was the UK’s first National Institutes for Health Research Translational Research Professor in Oncology. Having originally trained in medicine at Trinity College Oxford, where he gained a first class degree, he completed junior doctor posts in Oxford, and then undertook training and a residency programme in Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, returning to London to continue his career in oncology at The Royal Marsden and then St Bartholomew’s Hospitals. He has combined his medical career with healthcare investing and has worked with Atticus Capital, Lansdowne Partners and most recently Vitruvian Partners.


Justin has published over 700 peer-reviewed papers, as well as writing regularly for national newspapers and presenting new data on optimal therapies at major international conferences.  His laboratory work has concentrated on these areas including new druggable target discovery and gene regulation examining the role of non-coding RNAs in stem cells. His clinical trials have focused on novel mechanisms of action and also biosimilars, democratising expensive treatments and he led the worldwide development programme for Herzuma. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists, and sits on the advisory Boards of a number of international cancer committees. He chaired the World Vaccine Congress and Chaired the Irish Cancer Society oversight committee; he was awarded the Silvia Lawler prize. Justin’s team published in Nature Medicine the discovery of a new cancer-causing gene which has now been implicated in many solid tumours, and a drug development programme around this is underway. In 2016, Justin was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and became Editor-in-Chief of Oncogene at that time, Springer Nature’s cancer journal. During the COVID-19 pandemic, papers published by Justin described use of artificial intelligence to find a new treatment, leading to mechanistic and clinical studies for baricitinib and then its FDA approval. In randomised trials, it has the largest mortality benefit for any drug to treat hospitalised patients with COVID-19 and the WHO has placed it at the top of its evidence hierarchy. This simple once/daily tablet has saved thousands of lives and it lends itself for use in low- and middle-income countries.