Karim Fizazi, MD, PhD, is a medical oncologist at Gustave Roussy, and a full professor in Oncology at the University of Paris-Saclay in Villejuif, France.
Prof. Fizazi attained his medical degree in 1995. In 1997, he completed a fellowship at Gustave Roussy. After a visiting professorship at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston 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 Institute Gustave Roussy from 2005 to 2018 and he was promoted a professor at the University of Paris Sud in 2009. He is the President of the French Groupe d’Etude des Tumeurs Genito-Urinaires (GETUG) and the President of the French Study Group of Carcinomas of Unknown Primary (GEFCAPI). Prof. Fizazi is associate editor of European Journal of Cancer and consulting editor of European Urology. He has authored more than 350 peer-reviewed articles.
Amongst his major achievements, Prof. Fizazi demonstrated in 2010 the role of denosumab for the prevention of complications of bony metastases from prostate cancer. Prof. Fizazi established 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 was 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 showed that darolutamide, a drug that was first tested by Prof. Fizazi in phase 1 trials, clearly delays the onset of metastases or death in men with non-metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer.
In testicular cancer, Prof. Fizazi established in 2014 a new standard of care for young patients with poor-prognosis germ-cell tumors, thanks to an individualized algorithm of treatment in the GETUG 13 trial, 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 now head of the two first large PEACE European academic phase III trials: PEACE-1 (testing abiraterone and local radiotherapy in de novo metastatic prostate cancer), which has completed accrual, and PEACE-2 (testing cabazitaxel and pelvic radiotherapy in very high-risk localized prostate cancer). PEACE-4 which is testing the role of aspirin and that of statins in castrate-resistant prostate cancer was also launched in 2019.