Louis Chesler, MD, PhD, FRCPCH

Prof Louis Chesler has been a Professor of Childhood Cancer Biology and Therapeutics at The Institute of Cancer Research in London, and an Honorary Paediatric Oncology Consultant at The Royal Marsden NHS Trust, since 2008. Prof Chesler trained in the USA as a NIH funded MSTP (Medical Scientist Training Programme) recipient. He did his MD and PhD at Northwestern University in Chicago, a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NCI in Bethesday, MD, and his clinical training in Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at UCSF and Oakland Children's Hospital in San Francisco, where he did his subsequent postdoctoral fellowship and early research focusing on targeting of the oncogene MYCN in neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma. He now leads the ICR and Royal Marsden Centre for Paediatric Oncology Experimental Medicine (POEM), which aims to identify, characterise and therapeutically target the molecular drivers of childhood cancers.

His expertise is in the genomic characterisation of childhood cancers, using tissue and liquid-biopsy multiomics, in the modeling of childhood cancer oncogenic drivers, and in therapeutic targeting of these oncogenes (including MYC, MYCN and ALK). He has been an active member of CRUK (Cancer Research UK) funding panels aiming to support both clinicians and researchers across academic pathways in the UK, is an active member of the Innovative Therapy for Children with Cancer Consortium (ITCC) consortium and the International Society of Paediatric Oncology Europe (SIOPE) Paediatric Oncology Platform (ACCELERATE), and SIOPEN consortia, which all aim to improve drug development for children and adolescents with cancer.

He has been active in developing the science and therapeutic compounds for several innovative early phase clinical trials including the first-in-child ITCC eSMART trial of Fadraciclib, a CDK9 inhibitor, and the NANT (New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy) sponsored phase I/II international clinical trial of the ALK inhibitor Lorlatinib. He leads Stratified Medicine Paediatrics, the UK national effort to characterise the molecular mechanisms of cancer relapse in children, using novel technological platforms, which aims to rapidly detect cancer relapse and assign patients to novel therapies using data generated in cancer tissues and biofluids.