Dr. Sanjay Khanna
Royal Marsden Hospital · Institute of Cancer Research · Roche
Medical oncology registrar and pharmaceutical physician with expertise in industry-driven drug development. Currently based at the Royal Marsden Hospital (Early Diagnosis & Detection Unit), undertaking industry-sponsored doctoral research in patient-facing AI and multi-cancer early detection at the Institute of Cancer Research. Research interests: AI-driven patient communication for cancer screening, blood-based multi-cancer detection, health economics of screening programmes, and oncology drug access policy. Industry background spanning pharmaceutical medicine, regulatory science, clinical development, pharmacovigilance, and early-stage venture evaluation in life sciences.
Perspectives
The Case for AI in Cancer Screening: Why Now, and What Comes Next
The NHS lung screening programme has a 50% uptake problem — worst in the communities that need it most. I modelled whether AI-driven patient engagement could close the gap, and what the economics look like.
An Edge AI Proof-of-Concept Thanks to My Mother-in-Law
Could a language model running on a phone read every clinical letter and build a structured personal health record the patient actually owns? A proof-of-concept in patient data sovereignty.
Current Work
Multi-Cancer Early Detection
Developing microsimulation models to evaluate population-level screening strategies and their health-economic impact. Principal Investigator for U-RESPOND, a behavioural study on patient decision-making around MCED screening.
PhD Research · Roche / ICR
AI in Cancer Screening
Building clinical decision support systems and NLP tools for lung cancer screening pathways. Benchmarking LLMs for safety, quality and readability as patient-facing decision aids.
ESMO AI Merit Award 2025
Oncology Policy
Analysing UK drug access timelines post-Brexit, regulatory divergence between FDA and EMA, and its impact on cancer patients.
ESMO Congress 2025
Clinical Oncology
Medical oncology registrar trained across solid tumours and haematological malignancies.
NHS Medical Oncology
Working Groups & Committees
- Royal Marsden LLM/AI Research Working Group Defining institutional best practice for clinical AI, establishing governance frameworks for responsible deployment, and coordinating implementation strategy across oncology services.
- BRC Speech Technology Working Group Multi-disciplinary group advancing voice AI in clinical workflows: developing vocal biomarker technologies for disease detection and monitoring, establishing research standards and methodological frameworks, and building cross-institutional partnerships to translate speech-based diagnostics into clinical practice.
- PMST Trainees' Committee Committee member representing pharmaceutical medicine specialist trainees. 2021–2023.
Selected Publications
All publications →- Antibody-Drug Conjugates in Genitourinary Malignancies: The Clinical Trial Landscape and Emerging Efficacy Benchmarks ASCO GU 2026
- Instructed Large Language Models as a Decision-Aid Tool for Lung Cancer Screening Participants ESMO AI 2025
- Performance of Publicly Available LLMs as Decision-Aids for Lung Cancer Screening ESMO AI 2025
- Access to Oncology Drugs in the UK – Are We Falling Behind Europe After Brexit? ESMO 2025
- Enablers and Barriers of Clinical Trial Participation in Adult Patients from Minority Ethnic Groups Trials 2025
- Regulatory Approvals for Genitourinary Cancer by the FDA and EMA Over 20 Years JCO 2024
Background
I completed academic foundation and core medical training at King's College Hospital on the haematology-oncology track. After a year in cardiac intensive care at the Royal Brompton, I joined Roche's physician rotation programme in 2019.
Over six years at Roche, I rotated through regulatory affairs, medical affairs, pharmacovigilance, clinical development, and search and evaluation, gaining an end-to-end perspective on the pharmaceutical product lifecycle. Alongside this, I continued specialist training in medical oncology at Imperial NHS Trust.
From 2021 to 2024, I served as portfolio mentor at Start Codon, Cambridge's life sciences accelerator (backed by Cambridge Innovation Capital and Genentech), contributing clinical and commercial due diligence to early-stage venture selection.
In 2024, I began industry-sponsored doctoral research at the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research, focused on multi-cancer early detection, microsimulation modelling, and health AI.