Dr. Keith Kerr Receives 2025 Heine H. Hansen Award at European Lung Cancer Congress

Keith M. Kerr, BSc, MB, ChB, FRCPath, FRCPE, consultant pathologist for NHS Grampian and honorary chair in pulmonary pathology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, was honored with the 2025 Heine H. Hansen Award during the opening session of the European Lung Cancer Congress (ELCC) today in Paris, France.

“The award recognizes Professor Kerr for his exceptional contributions to thoracic oncology research and education and his extensive work in the classification of non–small cell lung cancer and his contribution to guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer,” said ELCC 2025 scientific co-chair Enrico Ruffini, MD, of the University of Torino.

Dr. Kerr has “worked in diagnostic histopathology with a special interest in Thoracic Pathology, but has always maintained close links with the clinical practice of thoracic medicine, especially thoracic oncology,” according to his ESMO biography.

These interests and experiences were reflected in Dr. Kerr’s award lecture and keynote presentation, titled “HHH: History, Histopathology & Hyperbole. Lung Cancer Pathology Comes of Age.”

Dr. Kerr reflected on the evolving relationship between pathology, diagnosis, and treatment that he has seen throughout his career.

“We’ve had lots and lots of prognostic factors over the years, but these don’t really contribute to our clinical management,” he said. “But the appearance of drugs with differential efficacy according to pathological diagnosis has completely changed everything. A few people in this room will remember once upon a time that a pathologist would make a diagnosis and give a specific tissue diagnosis of lung cancer, but it didn’t make any difference whatsoever to what was done to the patient, particularly with advanced [cases].”

Dr. Kerr also outlined recent developments in the field and how they may shape the future of pathology.

“We’ve seen other very interesting data looking at artificial intelligence to analyze the immunohistochemical images in a way that the human eye would simply not be able to do,” he explained.

However, he noted that the use of digital images and artificial intelligence will come with multiple considerations, including cost. Dr. Kerr also outlined the overall state of the field and the issues facing pathologists.

“In the future, there are a lot of challenges for pathologists, including training pathologists who are not currently trained in molecular issues, for example,” he said. “And also, I think the way that services are organized is suboptimal, especially the separation of molecular and tissue pathology, which is very prevalent in many parts of the world, including my own.”

He concluded by sharing and reflecting upon a quote from Heine H. Hansen that he uses each year at the beginning of his lung cancer lecture to undergraduate classes: “To decrease the death rate of lung cancer is today one of the major challenges of medical doctors all over the world. In Europe alone, one person is dying of lung cancer every 2 minutes.”

“If you read this quote, it’s quite sobering, and we’re still in quite a sobering situation, but I do like to think that things have gone a bit better over the last 35 years, and I also like to think that the pathology community has contributed something towards that improvement,” Dr. Kerr concluded.

In the photo at top, Dr. Kerr is shown delivering the 2025 Heine H. Hansen Award Lecture during the opening session of the European Lung Cancer Congress in Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of the European Society for Medical Oncology)