Professor Lee has initiated and led several large-scale NCRI lung cancer trials over the past 2 decades which have changed clinical practice and improved treatment outcomes for lung cancer patients. His group established the use of gemcitabine/carboplatin chemotherapy to treat lung cancer and this treatment regimen remains the standard chemotherapy doublet to treat squamous lung cancer. His innovative trials with thalidomide as a cancer weapon and the smart drug erlotinib to treat poor performance lung cancer patients received worldwide publicity including being featured on BBC Ten O’Clock News at launch. His ET trial was the first prospective biomarker chemotherapy trial with ERCC1 to select lung cancer patients for doublet chemotherapy and demonstrated that platinum is superior to non-platinum chemotherapy. His latest trials examine the role of atezolizumab immunotherapy to treat poor performance non-small cell lung cancer patients (IPSOS) and hydroxychloroquine to treat small cell lung cancer (Study 15). His team was also part of the international FLAURA and KEYNOTE-189 Investigators that recently established osimertinib and chemotherapy-pembrolizumab triplet as first-line therapy to treat EGFR mutant and wild-type lung cancer respectively. His trials have been recognised at major international conferences with many invited Presidential, Plenary and Oral Presentations at World Lung Cancer Conference, ASCO and ESMO and resulted in several 1^st or senior author publications in high impact journals. His practice-changing trials and 4* high impact research publications were used for the REF 2014 exercise which ranked UCL top for research in UK.

Professor Lee has also contributed to several other seminal papers (as 1st corresponding or last author) in other types of cancer including i) first-in-human discovery in 1990 of the inactivation and regeneration of the first human DNA repair protein (MGMT/ATase) following chemotherapy and that its expression is highly heterogeneous in human tumours, which led to the new treatment strategy of targeting cancer DNA repair proteins; ii) established 5-day dosing temozolomide as the standard chemotherapy treatment to treat high grade brain glioma including GBM, based on his previous discovery in 1994 that its anticancer activity is due to cumulative inactivation of the resistance MGMT DNA repair protein; iii) established the routine use of G-CSF after stem-cell transplantation in 1998 because of faster haematological recovery and shorter hospital stay; and iv) his dataset on advanced Hodgkin lymphoma contributed to the International Hodgkin Prognostic Score, after his group conducted the first analysis in 1997 to show that it is not possible to identify a poor risk group to warrant stem cell transplants after standard chemotherapy.