John Angus Hickman

John Angus Hickman (born 10 September 1945) is a British-French cancer pharmacologist who worked in UK and American universities and in the French pharmaceutical industry. He was born in Nottingham, UK, to a Scottish mother and English father. He has two children from his marriage to Jennifer Pullan and a third from his marriage to Nathalie Aveline.
He proposed highly innovative directions for cancer drug discovery, suggesting cell signalling as drug targets in the early 1980s and in the 1990s the investigation of the role of apoptosis (cell death) in determining the sensitivity and resistance of cancer cells to anticancer drugs. He led teams that discovered anticancer drugs inhibiting proteins that regulate apoptosis.
==Education==
Hickman was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Ashbourne, Derbyshire (founded in 1585). He obtained his PhD in heterocyclic organic chemistry in 1971 from Aston University in Birmingham UK, after obtaining a degree in pharmacy. He was a Medical Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the Chester Beatty Institute in London, working with Professor Tom Connors on the mechanism of action of anticancer alkylating agents. He obtained an MSc in biochemistry from Kings College London in 1974 and a DSc in 1989.
==Career==
After a lectureship in Liverpool, he returned to Aston University in 1977, where shortly afterwards the UK Cancer Research Campaign (now CRUK) established their Experimental Cancer Chemotherapy Group. The preclinical activity of antitumour drug Temozolomide (Temodal), synthesised by Robert Stone with Malcolm Stevens, was then discovered by Drs. Hickman, Langdon and Gibson. In 1982 he spent 18 months in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University where with Tom Tritton he suggested that cell membrane signalling could be a target for anticancer drugs, an iconoclastic idea at that time. In 1989 he co-organised the first foreign American Association for Cancer Research Special Meeting in Cambridge UK on anticancer drugs targeting cell signalling. He moved to Manchester University’s School of Biological Sciences in 1989 as the Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Professor of Molecular Pharmacology where he directed a research group investigating the role of apoptosis in cancer drug sensitivity and resistance. Hickman initiated and was director of a joint laboratory with ICI Pharmaceuticals (becoming Zeneca) and the School of Biological Sciences. He became head of the Division of Physiology, Pharmacology and Toxicology in the School of Biological Sciences and was a co-founder of the Manchester University Biotechnology Incubator, whose restaurant was called “Hickmans”. After short sabbaticals at Northwestern University in Evanston, Oxford University and two summers periods at Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory, Hickman left Manchester for Paris in 1999 to head a new cancer drug discovery group at the private pharmaceutical company Servier, largely focussing on the discovery of drugs inhibiting the anti-apoptotic proteins BCL-2 and MCL-13,4. Retiring in 2010 he then coordinated a European Union Innovative Medicines project PREDECT investigating preclinical models that better represented the complexity of cancer. He now writes about the challenges of drug therapy for cancer, the limitations of preclinical models and the social hegemony of the pharmaceutical industry. He works with the group Consilium Scientific.
==National and international activities==
Hickman co-chaired three American Association for Cancer Research special meetings and sat on their annual meeting programme committee. He chaired the 1996 Gordon Conference on Cancer Chemotherapy at Oxford University, initiated the European Association of Cancer Research meeting “Goodbye Flat Biology” and for a decade co-chaired the European School of Haematology’s meetings on apoptosis. He presented his teams’ work at The Royal Society in London, the Nobel Forum at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and at many international venues. He is currently a Board Member of Consilium Scientific. Living in Paris and Montpellier he divides his time between his family, writing, attending classical music concerts and being a Parisian “flaneur”.
Category:Pharmacologists
Category:Alumni of Aston University