Professor Gordon McVie is widely regarded as a leading international authority in the research and treatment of cancer. He spends part of his time in Milan as Senior Consultant to the European Institute of Oncology, and is Visiting Professor at Glasgow University, in Scotland, and Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology at the Welsh Cancer Institute, Cardiff.

Previously Professor McVie was Chief Executive of the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC), the largest grant giving charity in the UK, which, under his aegis, took over sixty molecules from the laboratory into clinical trial. Throughout the Eighties, he was Clinical Research Director at the National Cancer Institute of the Netherlands, and Consultant in Oncology at the Antoni van Leewenhoek Hospital, Amsterdam. While there he co-founded the European Organisation for Treatment and Research into Cancer (EORTC), New Drug Development Office. As President of EORTC, he set up the present Drug Development Group in Brussels, and with NCI support, the European New Drug Development Network. In the UK he was one of the architects of the Cancer Trials Networks in Scotland, Wales, and England, and was a founding member of the National Cancer Research Institute. He serves on key committees of AACR and ASCO, and on the boards of the National Cancer Institutes of France, Italy and Holland. In the UK, he was on the boards of cancer institutes in London, Glasgow and Manchester.

He has authored almost 300 peer-reviewed articles and contributed to over 35 books. For the past seven years he has served the US Journal of the National Cancer Institute as its European editor.