Charles M. Perou, PhD, FAACR, Honored With 2026 William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award
SAN ANTONIO – Charles M. Perou, PhD, Fellow of the AACR Academy, will receive the William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award during the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2026 (SABCS), to be held December 8-11 at the Henry B. González Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas.
The William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award was established in 1992 to commemorate McGuire’s significant contributions to breast oncology. McGuire was a professor of medicine and the first chief of oncology at UT Health San Antonio who helped establish the use of estrogen receptor testing to guide treatment for patients with breast cancer, an early advance in precision medicine. He and Charles A. Coltman, MD, founded SABCS in 1978.
Perou is the May Goldman Shaw Distinguished Professor of Molecular Oncology and a professor in the Department of Genetics and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He is also the co-director of the Computational Medicine Program at the UNC School of Medicine, faculty director of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center Bioinformatics Group, and co-leader of the UNC Lineberger Breast Cancer Research Program. He is being recognized for his influential contributions to the understanding of breast cancer biology and treatment and his pioneering research in cancer genomics.
In a landmark study published in 2000, Perou used gene expression profiling of breast tumors to identify distinct molecular subtypes that are now known to be associated with prognosis. To enable classification of breast cancers into these subtypes, he later developed the 50-gene Prediction Analysis of Microarray (PAM50) gene signature, which has been instrumental in allowing researchers to classify breast cancers and study the efficacy of treatments in different subtypes. By analyzing several factors, including a tumor’s molecular subtype, a PAM50-based assay reports the likelihood of disease recurrence and is cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to predict the risk of recurrence in certain patients with breast cancer.
As the breast cancer leader of The Cancer Genome Atlas Program, Perou leveraged the database to discover that basal-like breast cancers are associated with molecular features that are genetically distinct from other breast cancers but similar to those of high-grade serous ovarian cancer. In addition, he uncovered that the basal-like subtype is associated with most cases of triple-negative breast cancer and is overrepresented in Black women. This latter finding has laid the foundation for understanding how differences in molecular subtype may contribute to racial disparities in breast cancer outcomes.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award from the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium,” said Perou. “It reflects the work of my students, colleagues, collaborators, and family, and the patients and advocates who inspire us all. I remain committed to research that improves the lives of those affected by breast cancer.”
Perou has been recognized with numerous other awards and honors throughout his career, including the UNC Award for Excellence in Basic Science Mentoring (2023), the Bates College Sesquicentennial Prize (2022), the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Distinguished Lectureship in Breast Cancer Research (2022), the AACR Team Science Award (2020), the OncLive Giants of Cancer Care Award (2019), the Association of American Cancer Institutes Distinguished Scientist Award (2018), the Susan G. Komen Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction (2016), and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Jill Rose Award for Distinguished Biomedical Research (2016).
Perou was elected as a Fellow of the AACR Academy in 2023 and was awarded an honorary doctorate in medicine by the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2026.
“Since the major discovery of the molecular subtypes of breast cancer, Dr. Perou has led and contributed to a number of scientific advances that not only have elucidated the biology of breast cancer but also have informed patient prognosis and care,” said SABCS Co-director Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, FAACR, director of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and associate dean of oncology programs at UT Southwestern Medical Center. “He is an inspirational and highly impactful scientist and translational investigator and most deserving of the William L. McGuire Memorial Lecture Award.”
Perou earned his undergraduate degree from Bates College and his doctoral degree in experimental pathology from the University of Utah. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University in the laboratory of David Botstein, PhD, FAACR. He will present his award lecture, titled “Quantitative Biomarkers and Disease Subtypes: The Building Blocks of Precision Medicine,” on Thursday, December 10, at 9 a.m. CT.
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