Professor Andrea Frilling

About Professor Frilling

Andrea Frilling is a Professor of Surgery and chair in Endocrine Surgery at Imperial College London. She is a practising consultant surgeon with an interest in the translation of basic medical research findings into the clinical setting. She has authored over 500 peer-reviewed publications, many in high impact journals. She received her primary medical education in Germany and achieved a PhD degree for her work on the X-linked dominant inheritance of phosphorylase kinase deficiency in mice.

Her postdoctoral thesis on pre-symptomatic screening for medullary thyroid carcinoma in families of patients with multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2 was awarded with the von Langenbeck Prize, the most prestigious award of the German Surgical Society. She trained in visceral surgery and has focused on endocrine and hepato-pancreato-biliary surgery.

Her research work on inhibition of oncogenic RET signalling by adenovector-mediated expression of a dominant negative RET mutant in medullary thyroid carcinoma has been awarded with substantive funds by the German Research Society. The German Cancer Foundation provided major grants for her work on pre-symptomatic genetic screening in patients with familial medullary thyroid carcinoma. She was a founding member of the international consortium that identified specific mutations of the RET protooncogene as the underlying genetic cause of the hereditary variant of medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) and set up studies on genotype-phenotype correlation in multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2 and familial medullary carcinoma (published in Nature Genetics).She introduced a genetic screening program for MTC into clinical practice in Germany and established the first national laboratory which offered DNA based RET mutational analysis for identification of gene carriers. This work has led to the recommendation of prophylactic thyroidectomy in asymptomatic RET protooncogene carriers with a consequence of clear prevention of cancer development.

Her further research in thyroid tumours aimed to determine the molecular aetiology of follicular thyroid neoplasms and to improve the accuracy of diagnosis, clinical management and therapy of these distinct entities. Together with her US-based collaborators she identified a microarray-based genetic signature that can differentiate between benign and malignant follicular neoplasia of the thyroid.

NHS and Academic Posts

Honorary Consultant and Professor of Surgery, chair in Endocrine Surgery, Imperial College London.

Additional information

Professor Frilling speaks German, Italian and Slovenian