Professional background
Dr Matthew Fittall is a consultant clinical oncologist and UCL honorary associate professor specialising in the treatment and research of urological (GU) cancers.
He studied natural sciences and pre-clinical medicine at St John’s College Cambridge where he was awarded a Rolleston scholarship, and completed his clinical medical studies at Christ Church Oxford, where he was in proxime accessit to the Margaret Harris prize.
After junior medical training in South London and Core medical training at UCLH (MRCP 2011), he was awarded an NIHR academic clinical fellowship in clinical oncology, completing specialist training between the Kent Oncology Centre, Guy’s and St Thomas’s and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. He was awarded the RCR Gold medal as the top final FRCR candidate 2016.
He joined the uro-oncology team at UCLH in 2022 and specialises in the oncological (radiotherapy and chemotherapy) management of penile, bladder and prostate cancers.
Research interests
Dr Fittall’s pre-doctoral work in 2014-15 was with Sophia Karagiannis and Andrew Tutt at King’s College London investigating humoral responses to triple-negative breast cancer. He was then awarded one of the first CRUK Clinical Doctoral (PhD) Fellowship at Francis Crick Institute in 2016 working with Peter Van Loo, Sam Behjati and Adrienne Flanagan. During this time he used computational approaches to study the evolution of the cancer genome, with a particular focus on the complex mutational patterns found in benign and malignant primary bone tumours.
In 2022 he has joined with Gert Attard at UCL to explore the genomics of radiation resistance in prostate cancer.
Publications
Lee LYW, Starkey T, Ionescu MC, …, Fittall MW, Fowler T, Johnson P. Vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 breakthrough infections in patients with cancer (UKCCEP): a population-based test-negative case-control study. Lancet Oncol. 2022 Jun;23(6):748-757. doi: 10.1016/S1470-2045(22)00202-9.
Fittall MW, Lyskjaer I, Ellery P, Lombard P, Ijaz J, Strobl AC, Oukrif D, Tarabichi M, Sill M, Koelsche C, Mechtersheimer G, Demeulemeester J, Tirabosco R, Amary F, Campbell PJ, Pfister SM, Jones DT, Pillay N, Van Loo P, Behjati S, Flanagan AM. Drivers underpinning the malignant transformation of giant cell tumour of bone. J Pathol. 2020 Dec;252(4):433-440.
ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium. Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes. Nature. 2020 Feb;578(7793):82-93. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-1969-6.
Fittall MW, Van Loo P. Translating insights into tumor evolution to clinical practice: promises and challenges. Genome Med. 2019 Mar 29;11(1):20.
Fittall MW, Mifsud W, Pillay N, Ye H, Strobl AC, Verfaillie A, Demeulemeester J, Zhang L, Berisha F, Tarabichi M, Young MD, Miranda E, Tarpey PS, Tirabosco R, Amary F, Grigoriadis AE, Stratton MR, Van Loo P, Antonescu CR, Campbell PJ, Flanagan AM, Behjati S. Recurrent rearrangements of FOS and FOSB define osteoblastoma. Nat Commun. 2018 Jun 1;9(1):2150.