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David Neal

David started his academic career in Leeds working with David Johnston, where he was trained in gastroenterological surgery. He then moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and was First Assistant, Senior Lecturer and later appointed to the substantive Chair of Surgery as Head of Department. In 2002 he moved to Cambridge as the inaugural Chair of Surgical Oncology where he was also Senior Group Leader at the CRUK Cambridge Cancer Institute and Life Member at Clare Hall College. He specialised in retroperitoneal surgery for testis cancer and introduced robotic surgery to Cambridge. Over fourteen of his trainees have been appointed to Professorships. Following retirement from his Chair in Cambridge, he held a Chair of Surgical Oncology in Oxford and took up the role of Senior Vice President of Global Research at RELX (Elsevier). He runs an R&D group (the Research Collaboration Unit) developing novel indicators of research impact and better methods of search and retrieval and summarisation of research articles.

His research was focused molecular abnormalities of androgen receptor signalling and gene alterations in prostate cancer; and on the clinical and surgical treatment of patients with urological cancers. He was appointed CBE in 2014 in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List and won the St Peter's Medal (British Association of Urological Surgeons) in 2001. He gained more than £60 M of research funding including CRUK, NIHR, MRC. He has published more than 700 peer-reviewed articles which have received more than 61,000 citations and his “H” index is 124.

A selection of publications is shown below.

  1. Sushentsev N, Warren AY …..Neal DE, Hamdy FC. Active Monitoring, Surgery, and Radiotherapy for Cribriform-Positive and Cribriform-Negative Prostate Cancer: A Secondary Analysis of the PROTECT Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Oncol. 2025. doi: 10.1001/jamaoncol.2025.4125
  2. Martin RM, Turner EL, ….Neal DE, Hamdy FC, Donovan JL, Group CAPT. Prostate-Specific Antigen Screening and 15-Year Prostate Cancer Mortality: A Secondary Analysis of the CAP Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2024;331(17):1460-70
  3. Hamdy FC, Donovan JL, Lane JA, …. Neal DE. Fifteen-Year Outcomes after Monitoring, Surgery, or Radiotherapy for Prostate Cancer. The New England journal of medicine. 2023;388(17):1547-58.
  4. Donovan JL, Hamdy FC, Lane JA,……… Neal DE. Patient-Reported Outcomes 12 Years after Localized Prostate Cancer Treatment. NEJM Evidence. 2023;2(4).
  5. Buhigas C, Warren AY, …………….Neal DE …………., et al. The architecture of clonal expansions in morphologically normal tissue from cancerous and non-cancerous prostates. Mol Cancer. 2022;21(1):183
  6. Tran MGB, Bibby BAS, Yang L, Lo F, Warren AY, Shukla D,… & Neal DE. Independence of HIF1a and androgen signaling pathways in prostate cancer. BMC cancer. 2020;20(1):469.