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 Bethesda, MD, and his clinical training in Pediatric Hematology and Oncology at UCSF and Oakland Children's Hospital in San Francisco. He did his subsequent postdoctoral fellowship and practiced as a Pediatric Oncologist at UCSF, with research focusing on therapeutic inhibition of the oncogene MYCN in neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma.

Until 2025, he led the ICR and Royal Marsden Centre for Paediatric Oncology Experimental Medicine (POEM), which led a national programme in precision medicine, a preclinical hospital to model childhood cancers and evaluate new drugs and a prominent drug development effort that identified and characterised first-in-child biomarkers and therapeutics for high-risk childhood cancers. Since 2026 he is the new executive director of the Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia (CCI) in Sydney, which hosts the Minderoo Comprehensive Children’s Cancer Centre together with Sydney
Children’s Hospital.

His expertise is in the genomic characterisation of childhood cancers, using tissue and liquid-biopsy multiomics, in the modeling of childhood cancer drivers, and in therapeutic targeting of 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 developed and led 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. At CCI he now leads a dedicated cancer research institute that hosts Zero Cancer, Australia’s national precision medicine programme, and actively develops innovative clinical trials for childhood cancers.