Frontiers at St Mark’s 2023

Dr Kai-Keen Shiu PhD FRCP is a Consultant in the Gastrointestinal Oncology Unit at University College London Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Honorary Associate Professor at the UCL Cancer Institute. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London, and a member of ASCO, ESMO, and the Association of Cancer Physicians UK. His translational research interests include targeted treatments and immunotherapy for GI malignancies and carcinoma of unknown primary (CUP).

He is Chair of the NCRI MUO-CUP Workstream and a member of the NCRI Colorectal Advanced and Adjuvant Disease Subgroup. He is a collaborator in the PEACE (Posthumous tissuE donAtion in CancEr) study, and a member of the Gastrointestinal Oncology and CUP subgroups at UCL Cancer Institute/Francis Crick Institute. He is the Principal Investigator of the UCL/UCLH Gastrointestinal Cancer Translational Research Biobank.

Dr Khurum Khan is a research-active consultant who remains at the forefront of cutting-edge research focusing on new targeted therapies in cancer, immunotherapy, and genomics. Leading gastrointestinal research at the Clinical Research Facility (CRF) at University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Trust, his team has concentrated on druggable target discovery, and at UCL Cancer Institute, the team’s focus remains the discovery of biomarkers using liquid biopsies, patient-derived organoids (PDOs) and other novel technologies.

Dr Khan has led several research projects over the past few years, including the setup and conduct of large multicentre academic studies into advanced gastrointestinal cancers. As well as this, Dr Khan has written and published several high-impact research papers in peer-reviewed journals, and is the associate editor of the gastroenterology section of Frontiers in Oncology.

Rille is currently a consultant medical oncologist at St Bart's Hospital in London. She is originally from Estonia and finished her undergraduate medical degree and postgraduate training in Oncology there in 2016. She was then awarded The Collins/Pancreatic Cancer UK Clinical Research PhD Fellowship at The University of Manchester/The Christie NHS Foundation Trust. She successfully defended her PhD on pancreatic cancer in 2021 and then joined The Royal Marsden GI unit for a Senior Research Fellowship. In 2022 she was appointed as a consultant medical oncologist in GI cancers at St Bart's Hospital.

Outside of her current clinical role, she has various other international roles like being a member of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Young Oncologist Committee and co-chair of the Postgraduate Medical Education Committee in The International Association for Medical Education (AMEE).