Dr Chia Whay Kuang John

Dr John Chia is a medical oncologist practising at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital, Singapore.

His subspeciality interests include ovarian, endometrial, cervical, breast and colorectal cancers, as well as the management of rare tumours such as melanoma, uterine sarcoma, and germ cell tumours.

In 2008, Dr Chia undertook his postgraduate fellowship in the field of immunotherapy for solid tumours, namely in the development of dendritic cancer vaccines, adoptive T cell therapy, and immune biomarker monitoring for cancers. In 2011 and 2012, he completed a second fellowship at The Royal Marsden Hospital in London in the advanced management of gynaecological cancers.

Dr Chia was the former chief of the gynaecology oncology service in the Division of Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Centre Singapore. He is also a founding board member of the Gynecologic Cancer Group Singapore, and the chair of its scientific subcommittee. He is also a council member of the College of Clinician Scientists at the Academy of Medicine, Singapore, and an adjunct associate professor at DUKE-NUS Medical School.

He sits on the scientific board of the International Aspirin Foundation, and lectures widely, in Japan, Korea, HK, China and UK, as well as plenary symposia lectures in Germany, Australia and ESMO Asia. He is also a consultant at several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, advising the development of novel therapeutics and immunotherapy for cancer.

Dr Chia sits on the Singapore Cancer Society’s Women’s Gynaecological Cancer Awareness Committee, and has helped to write the Singapore ovarian and uterine cancer management guidelines (SCAN).

He also sits on the executive committee of the Singapore Society of Oncology (SSO) and their Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium, aiming to promote access, recruitment, and immune monitoring and toxicity management for patients on immunotherapeutic treatments in Singapore.

Dr Chia is extremely active in clinical trial research, and has developed numerous research protocols and trials for ovarian, cervical, colorectal, nasopharyngeal, and breast cancer.

Early on in his career, he was also actively engaged with the then nascent field of immunotherapy for solid cancers, and was heavily involved with the leadership and development of 7 immunotherapy clinical trials in Singapore.

He has published widely in leading international journals, and holds numerous local and international research grants exceeding $10,000,000 – for clinical research exploring immune checkpoint inhibitors, cancer vaccines, T cell therapy, chemoprevention with aspirin, and small molecule inhibitors for cancer.

In 2010, he was awarded ‘Best Poster’ for a tumour-specific cancer vaccine trial at the European Society of Medical Oncology, Milan (amongst several thousand submissions), and more recently ‘Best Poster’ at ESMO Asia 2017, for his clinical trial in aggressive ovarian cancer.