Professor Ray Powles CBE

Prof Ray Powles trained at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and first worked as a junior doctor in 1965 on a leukaemia unit at a time when the disease was virtually untreatable, all patients succumbing usually in days or a few weeks. He then moved to the Royal Marsden in 1969 where he worked until 2004. He initially was involved in defining the use of active specific immunotherapy for acute myeloblastic leukaemia at a time of the Nixon era of looking for immunological approaches to ‘beat cancer’. As a part of this programme, he was given the fourth blood Cell Separator worldwide costing the equivalent of £500k to make the vaccine, showed, and reported in 1972, the first use of this machine for plasma exchange in myeloma. He was subsequently invited by Jan Waldenstrom to give a seminar in Malmo in 1972. In 1973 he led the team responsible for the first successful allogeneic Bone Marrow Transplant in Europe undertaken in 1973. In the early 80’s he was also the first to use cyclosporine and parental acyclovir and took both of these drugs through from first patient to approval, prior to use in the US. He, with Tim MacElwain, reported the first use of autologous Stem Cell transplant for myeloma in the Lancet in 1983. He was at the forefront of the use of haemopoietic growth factors and was particularly involved in the licensing of GM-CSF. All of these developments have for three decades been part of routine evidence-based clinical practice. Following the untimely death of Tim McElwain he ran the Royal Marsden Hospital Myeloma Unit and created the RMH prospective myeloma database that was the basis of consistently allowing the RMH to dominate peer-reviewed presentations at ASH most years.

He now runs a Haemato-oncology Unit in the private sector at Cancer Centre London, at Parkside, Wimbledon.

He was a Panel member of the Independent Reconfiguration Panel from 2003 to 2013, an advisory non-departmental public body (NDPB) that advises the Secretary of State for Health on contested proposed reconfigurations.

In 2002 Ray founded and became Chairman of the European Blood and Marrow Transplant (EBMT) Nuclear Accident Committee, a network of 500 centres throughout Europe that has harmonized EU and US care and training if a large radiation incident occurred, particularly if terrorists initiated. He has been a member since 2009 of the Emergency Preparedness Clinical Leadership Advisory Group (EPCLAG) of the UK Dept of Health, to advise on Radiation Emergencies

Ray was a trustee until recently of the health policy parliamentary advice group, the New Health Network, and was a Member in 2002 of the Cabinet Office Public sector team for streamlining Healthcare Inspections. He also was a member of the 2008 NHS Leadership Workstream panel.

Between 2000 and 2008 he was a Director, and Board member of the Swiss Biopharmaceutical Company BioPartners, which became the first Company ( simultaneously with Sandoz) to have approved by EMEA a biosimilar drug hGh growth hormone.

He formed and was the first Chairman until Dec 2010 of the American Society of Haematology (ASH) Scientific Committee for Plasma Cell Biology, having previously been Chairman of the ASH Haemopoetic Growth Factor Scientific Committee. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Myeloma Working Group.

He is a founding Patron of a new Indian charity New Indian Cancer Care Initiative (NICCI) that was launched at the British High Commission in Dehli in Nov 2010. He has been a Medical Advisor to the Bud Flanagan Leukaemia Charity, and AmeriCares India Advisory Board Member since 2008. For the last 4 years, he has been a Trustee of the Russian Children’s Leukaemia Charity ‘Gift of Life’.

He has written 1200 scientific articles, abstracts and over 250 peer-reviewed papers; and lectures on the International circuit.

In 1999 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Cancer Patients Aid Association for his work in training and facilitating Cancer care.

Prof Ray Powles only sees adults.