Evandro de Azambuja, MD, PhD, is the Head of the Medical Support Team (Academic Promoting Team) located at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium, where he is responsible for the continuous supervision of 4-5 research fellows and the medical supervision of large phase III clinical trials. He is also the MDT coordinator for Breast Cancer at the Jules Bordet.

Dr. de Azambuja earned his first PhD from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, in May 2007 and his second PhD from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B) in December 2015.

His principal interest in medical oncology is breast cancer, especially in the adjuvant/neoadjuvant settings. He is deeply involved in the conduct of large phase III trials in breast cancer (some of them practice changing), such as HERA (adjuvant trastuzumab), ALTTO (trastuzumab and/or lapatinib), APHINITY (trastuzumab with or without pertuzumab), Alexandra (adjuvant atezolizumab in triple negative breast cancer), Olympia (adjuvant Olaparib) and – in the neoadjuvant setting – the LORELEI trial which tested the efficacy of PI3K inhibition in combination with endocrine therapy (Global PI). He is also engaged in studies concerning cancer toxicity of new drugs in oncology as well as in long-term follow-up of patients enrolled in clinical trials, with a focus on cardiotoxicity. Within the latter context, he was a co-author of guidelines on treatment-related cardiac toxicity by the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and has been acting as a member of the ESC Council for cardio-oncology for the past few years. He is also a past chair of the survivorship task force of the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. de Azambuja was actively involved in accumulating knowledge on the impact of COVID-19 in patients with cancer and led a collaboration between BSMO and the Belgian governmental institution Sciensano. He has also developed a database of nearly 1,000 patients with cancer and COVID-19 infection in Belgium, which will be the basis of an international collaboration between BSMO and the ESMO CoCARE registry. In addition, he launched a prospective clinical trial testing the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines in patients with cancer (solid and haematologic diseases), which is currently recruiting in Belgium and will soon start in Portugal (I-SPARC).

Dr. de Azambuja is currently ESMO Director of Membership and serves on the ESMO Executive Board and ESMO Council. He was previously Chair of the ESMO Fellowship Committee (2020-2022) and is a past member of the ESMO Young Oncologists Committee (YOC) and the ESMO Press & Media Affairs Committee. He is a faculty member of the ESMO Leaders Generation Programme, launched in 2016, and was Co-chair of this Programme 2018-2022. In January 2019 he was appointed as the Chair of the ESMO Leadership Generation Task Force (until 2022). He was a member of the ESMO Breast Faculty between 2017-2021, a Board Member of the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO) from 2015-2019 and is the current BSMO president (2023-2026).

Dr. de Azambuja is also a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO). He was an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) from 2013-2019 and is currently an Editorial Board Member of ESMO Open –Cancer Horizons. He has also acted as a reviewer for several oncology journals.

He has (co)-authored over 300 peer-reviewed articles and 15 book chapters. He has been a member of the Education and Scientific Committees of the ESMO Congress, ESMO Breast, ESMO Asia, EBCC and ECCO meetings and has been an invited international speaker at a number of conferences and countries.