Honored by both the Endocrine Society and the European Society of Endocrinology with the 2025 Transatlantic Alliance Award, Ashley B. Grossman, F.Med.Sci, has made significant contributions to endocrine research on both sides of the Atlantic. Endocrine News speaks with Grossman about what this award means to him, what drew him to endocrinology in the first place, and the importance of being a good mentor as well as a good mentee.
The recipient of the 2025 Transatlantic Alliance Award from the Endocrine Society and the European Society of Endocrinology (ESE) is Prof. Ashley B. Grossman, F.Med.Sci., emeritus professor of endocrinology at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow at Green Templeton College in Oxford, U.K; he is also a consultant endocrinologist at the Royal Free London and a professor of neuroendocrinology at Queen Mary University of London in London, U.K. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the Society’s journal Endocrine Reviews as well as an annual contributor to Endocrine News’ “Eureka!” article each December.
The Transatlantic Alliance Award, which launched in 2021, recognizes an international leader who has made significant advances in endocrine research on both sides of the Atlantic — in Europe and the United States. Grossman will present his award lecture at ENDO 2025 this July in San Francisco, Calif.
In his more than 550 peer-reviewed journal articles (among other types of publication), Grossman’s research has made vast contributions to improving the lives of patients with neuroendocrine tumors and pituitary disorders. Endocrine News asked him more about his illustrious career journey and the people he joined forces with along the way.
Endocrine News: What does this Transatlantic Alliance Award mean to you?
Ashley Grossman: It’s really nice to be appreciated, but to me it’s really about all the other people I have been working with over the years. I’ve never been someone who works quietly on their own in a corner — collaboration is paramount. It has been a wonderful experience working with people in Europe and the United States, working very collaboratively, sharing knowledge, sharing information and, in the final analysis, to the ultimate benefit of our patients.
For example, I had started working on cell lines with a young German scientist named Svenja Nölting, and we really got going on pheochromocytomas. I went to a few meetings at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and met Karel Pacak, and I thought this man sees more pheochromocytomas than anybody in the world, and so he must be the one whom she works with next. We ‘cross fertilized’ and had information going back and forwards. Svenja then went back to Munich, and now she’s in Zurich (as assistant professor for endocrine tumors and joint leader of the Neuroendocrine Tumor Board and the Endocrine and Neuroendocrine Tumor Center, ENETS Center of Excellence Zurich, at the University Hospital of Zurich and the University of Zurich, in Switzerland) leading her own team.
Karel and I remain long-standing friends and collaborators who share ideas and difficult patient cases. It’s been a real joy to be able to work with people who are bright, informed, enthusiastic, and who really want the whole field to progress, not so much for personal honor, but to actually move forward the clinical science of pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas. That’s been a great privilege when I look back on it all. Some people want to be the first to do XYZ, but I’m much more interested in trying to look at areas where other people aren’t very interested at the moment or not pursuing in great detail. I think that’s been the most enjoyable part of working with people at the NIH, which I’ve just seen in Nature is one of the most productive scientific organizations in biology in the world, and with enthusiastic young people as well. That makes you go to bed thinking, “Well, maybe I’ve done a little bit of good today after all.”
EN: What attracted you to endocrinology?
Grossman: It’s a rather convoluted career. I started doing a natural sciences degree at Cambridge but found that crystallography and the general theory of relativity didn’t really turn me on. I went back to London to read psychology and social anthropology, then thought I’d do a PhD in psycholinguistics. I’ve always been very interested in language and its neurological basis, but in a chance meeting with a professor (of endocrinology!), he told me I should read medicine. I applied to St. Bartholomew’s hospital, which is one the oldest hospitals in the world on the same site, but they turned me down! I was really irritated and wanted to “show them,” so I went to another medical school in London where I planned to focus on neuroscience. But after a further degree in neurosciences, with amazing charismatic teachers, I decided I just first wanted to get my medical degree, ended up going into neuroendocrinology, and then it just became too fascinating to return to anything else. The irony is, which I only realized decades later, that the senior author of one of the first major papers I wrote was the dean of the medical school who turned me down for entry. So, maybe he did help me after all.
Most of my early work was on the hypothalamus and pituitary, very brain orientated. But over the years I fell more into endocrine oncology, and I suppose the message is: Follow your interests. Whatever you do, you’ve got to be enthusiastic and enjoy what you’re doing. If something else glitters a little bit more brightly and you want to do that, then just go do it. That’s really what I’ve done. Most endocrinology deals with quality-of-life issues, which is fine and very rewarding. But with cancer you are dealing with quite tragic diseases, and maybe as I’ve gotten older I’m more comfortable dealing with the more serious aspects. That’s the way it’s worked out. But, as I said, working across the Atlantic with many people has always been a joy, and maybe I should be feeling guilty, as I’ve had fun.
“Most of my early work was on the hypothalamus and pituitary, very brain orientated. But over the years I fell more into endocrine oncology, and I suppose the message is: Follow your interests. Whatever you do, you’ve got to be enthusiastic and enjoy what you’re doing. If something else glitters a little bit more brightly and you want to do that, then just go do it.”
EN: Is there a particular career highlight that comes to mind?
Grossman: The one that is the most serendipitous was not really part of my career trajectory. A pediatrician asked me to take over the case of an 18-year-old boy with adrenal failure, which his sister had too, and which was rather odd. I was on a flight and opened up Science, where I happened to read that Roger Cone from the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland had just cloned the ACTH receptor. It occurred to me that everything about my patients could be explained if they had a mutation of the ACTH receptor. So, I met with a friend of mine called Adrian Clark, a superb researcher in the early days of molecular biology; in those days we didn’t have sequencers, we had bits of X-ray film, and we found the mutation hidden in his ACTH receptor as we predicted and in his sister. The parents were carriers of this gene but not affected. It sticks in my mind as being one of just chance and having an interesting thought. Most of the time, research is just slogging away but having the thought then coming straight back into the lab and saying, “let’s try this,” and seeing it work out was for me a highlight. I think it also shows the importance of seeing patients and how even a single patient can lead to novel findings.
EN: Can you tell us about other scientists you have mentored?
Grossman: A lot of young people came through my lab, and it reminds me of what a very ancient professor of pathology used to say to me: “What I’m most proud of is that 50 of my students have now become professors,” and I know what he means. Patricia Dahia, who came from Brazil and is now at The University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas, defined the two major clusters of pheochromocytomas by detailed genetic analysis after she left me. She got “fired up” into research, and I feel I sort of helped in some small way to launch her into a major career. Mirjam Christ-Crain worked with me for a while and is now one of the world’s foremost experts on vasopressin and oxytocin, and how to assess diabetes insipidus (as it used to be called). Gregory Kaltsas is a significant force in Athens, Greece; Andrea Isidori is a major endocrinologist at the University of Rome in Italy; and Dina Shrestha was very junior when she first came to me but is now head of the Endocrinology Department at Norvic International Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, and a major endocrine and diabetes force in South Asia. And very significantly, I was joined many years ago by Prof. Márta Korbonits, who has become an outstanding leader in international endocrinology.
If it wasn’t the work that they actually did with me, I feel that they got enthused enough to then go off and run their own careers. That old professor of mine used to say, “these are our metastases around the world” — maybe not the most felicitous expression but I can sort of understand. It’s just lovely to see people launch out and become so academically successful.
EN: Who would you credit for mentoring you?
Grossman: Probably the major influence was who I first went to work for. Michael Besser was a consultant and professor at “Bart’s,” and he got into pituitary tumors and hypothalamic hormones right at the very beginning. He was tough, and he didn’t bear fools gladly, but he was a really good clinician, and if you were loyal and worked hard, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for you. I learned medicine from him. When I left medical school, I wasn’t much of a clinical doctor, frankly, and he really taught me to be how to be a clinician.
The other person was Lesley Rees, who was professor of chemical endocrinology at Bart’s. She was somebody who became dean of a medical school yet was always supportive, friendly, and charming. You don’t often come across that in the academic world! So, both Mike and Lesley were the two formative influences on my “endocrine” life, really.
EN: Are you working on anything currently?
Grossman: I don’t have a research group anymore, although I’m still attached to my old research group (and I go there once a week where I can ask the stupid questions that other people are too embarrassed to ask). So now I see myself as supporting other people rather than directly involved in hands-on research. Endocrinology has given me the opportunity to travel, which is the other great love of my life, and I can go anywhere in Europe, or to South America or South Asia, and help people by getting them to write articles, or show them how to get things published as well as helping them to think through problems.
I was always rather better at the theory. I assure people — you can be terrible in the lab and still have a career. I was always dropping things and never getting things quite to work. I liked doing it, but I just wasn’t that good, so you have to play to your strengths and push the other things to one side. I am not much of a gardener either!
EN: What will you talk about in your award lecture at ENDO 2025?
Grossman: I think I will simply pull together where we are in terms of these not particularly rare tumors — pheochromocytomas, paragangliomas — what’s the state-of-the-art and where we’re going in the future. The area of new radionuclides as targeted therapy is very exciting, so I hope to start from the beginning and take us up to 2030 and beyond. [See box.]
I’ve been attending ENDO for 30 or 40 years, thanks to my old “prof,” who would choose a group of us to go and expose us in this way to international influences in endocrinology at the very start of our careers. We were really quite privileged.
EN: What has the Endocrine Society meant to you over the years?
Grossman: First, the size and the breadth and being exposed to such a huge number of influences has always been exciting. In more recent years, it has become such an open and inclusive body, with such a diversity of people and efforts to actually exploit that. It’s really now an “international society of endocrinology.” I go [to ENDO] as much to network and meet up with my friends and colleagues or strike up new research relationships. It has increasingly become very internationalist, and I think that’s to everyone’s benefit.
Horvath is a freelance writer based in Baltimore, Md. In the June issue, she wrote about the ENDO 2025 session, “Bariatric Surgery and Emerging Medications: Redefining Roles and Mechanisms.”
Loading ...