The study leaders

"Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in this country and sadly it leads to many thousands of deaths each year. It is important that we find its causes so that future cases can be prevented. The causation of breast cancer is complicated and to help to unravel these complexities the study will need to include very large numbers of women and to continue over many years."

Anthony Swerdlow was educated in medicine at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and holds doctorates in epidemiology from Glasgow, London and Oxford Universities. After junior posts in clinical medicine, he worked in epidemiology in Oxford, Glasgow and London, before he joined the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1987. He was Professor of Epidemiology there from 1996-2000, and then moved to The Institute of Cancer Research, where he is Professor and Head of Section of Epidemiology, Director of the Department of Health Cancer Screening Evaluation Unit, and an honorary consultant at the Royal Marsden Hospital. His research has been in chronic disease epidemiology, mainly on cancer. He has been elected a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Glasgow, and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

"There have been real improvements in breast cancer treatment and diagnosis over the last decade but what's absolutely vital for the future is to prevent the disease occurring in the first place. To do this we first need to pinpoint and understand the causes of breast cancer - an area of research that has not received enough attention to date."

Professor Alan Ashworth studied for his BSc in Chemistry and Biochemistry at Imperial College, London, before completing his PhD in Biochemistry at University College, London. Since 1986, he has worked in the Chester Beatty Laboratories at The Institute of Cancer Research in London and was a member of the team that discovered the BRCA2 gene in 1995. In 1997, Professor Ashworth was appointed Professor of Molecular Biology and became Head of Section of Gene Function and Regulation at The Institute Cancer Research. He was appointed Director of the Breakthrough Research Centre in August 1999. He is an elected member of EMBO and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.