Karim Fizazi, MD, PhD, is a medical oncologist at Institut Gustave Roussy and full professor in Oncology at the University of Paris Saclay in Villejuif, France.

After training as a medical student at the University of Poitiers, France, Prof. Fizazi completed his residency (Internat) in Paris and attained his medical degree in 1995. In 1997, he completed a fellowship in medical oncology at Gustave Roussy. After a visiting professorship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, USA from 1999 to 2001 where he was working on preclinical models of bone metastases from prostate cancer, he gained his PhD in Molecular Oncology in 2003. He was head of the Department of Cancer Medicine at Institut Gustave Roussy from 2005 to 2018 and he became full professor at the University of Paris in 2009. He is the president of the French Groupe d’Etude des Tumeurs Genito-Urinaires (GETUG). Prof. Fizazi is associate editor of European Journal of Cancer. Furthermore, he has authored numerous abstracts at international congresses and has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles.

Amongst his major achievements, Prof. Fizazi demonstrated in 2010 the role of a bone-targeted agent, denosumab, for the prevention of complications of bony metastases from prostate cancer, such as fractures or major pain in a large International trial including almost 2000 men. Prof. Fizazi was the first to establish in 2015 the role of early chemotherapy in order to prevent relapse in men with localized prostate cancer at high-risk for relapse in the GETUG 12 trial. Prof. Fizazi is the chair of two major pivotal trials testing next-generation androgen receptor axis targeting agents: LATITUDE which demonstrated in 2017 the impact of abiraterone on survival in men with de novo metastatic prostate cancer, and ARAMIS which also showed overall survival improvement with Darolutamide, a drug first tested by Prof. Fizazi in phase 1 trials, in men with non-metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer.

In testicular cancer, Prof. Fizazi could establish in 2014 with the GETUG 13 trial a new standard of care for young patients with poor-prognosis germ-cell tumors, thanks to an individualized algorithm of treatment, although no significant progress had been provided for these patients in the previous 25 years.

To push forward clinical research on prostate cancer in Europe, Prof. Fizazi created in 2013 the Prostate Cancer Consortium in Europe (PEACE). He’s currently leading three large PEACE European academic phase III trials: PEACE-1 (testing abiraterone and radiotherapy to local primary cancer in de novo metastatic prostate cancer), which has completed accrual, the currently ongoing PEACE-2 trial (testing cabazitaxel and pelvic radiotherapy in very high-risk localized prostate cancer), and PEACE-4, which is testing the role of aspirin and that of statins in castrate-resistant prostate cancer.