Dr. Toh Chee Keong

Biography

A doctor who has special training in diagnosing and treating cancer in adults using chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, biological therapy, and targeted therapy. A medical oncologist often is the main health care provider for someone who has cancer. A medical oncologist also gives supportive care and may coordinate treatment given by other specialists.

He worked at the National Cancer Centre Singapore for most of his career, with a 3-year stint intercalated at Raffles Cancer Centre where he was director of clinical research before joining Curie Oncology. He was the lead of the Lung Cancer Consortium project at National Cancer Centre who coordinated lung cancer research in Singapore, paving the way for many publications and discoveries. He was also part of the team who won the Large Collaborative Grant for their research on ‘Next-Generation Clinical Trials and Integrative Research for Fighting Lung Cancer’ awarded by National Medical Research Council.

He graduated from National University of Singapore with the Gibbs Gold Medal in 1995, followed by MRCP (UK) in 2000 and specialist accreditation in Medical Oncology in 2004. Under the Health Manpower Development Programme, he was in the United States at Burnham Institute in La Jolla and Moores Cancer Centre in San Diego.

Throughout the years, Dr. Toh was involved in clinical work, clinical trials and teaching. Among his many achievements is his published work on the clinical characteristics of lung cancer among never-smokers, one of the earliest publications in the world during a time when the molecular characteristic of this group of patients was not known yet. It was later discovered that lung cancer in never-smokers formed a big group in the Asian population.

Dr. Toh was one of the first oncologists in Singapore to administer high dose interleukin-2 as a form of immunotherapy treatment for kidney cancer and melanoma. Immunotherapy then transitioned to checkpoint inhibitors over the years and became a cornerstone in the treatment of many cancers today. He has led and was a co-investigator in many clinical trials. He was also a member in the workgroup for the Singapore Cancer Network (SCAN) guidelines for lung cancer, kidney cancer, prostate cancer and bladder cancer. In the area of teaching, he was Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore's Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and the Duke-NUS Medical School. Dr. Toh hopes to bring with him the extensive clinical experience to Curie Oncology to provide good experiential care to the patients, encourage them and let them know that someday, spring will come.

Dr. Toh's specialty interests are genitourinary oncology (prostate, kidney, bladder and testicular cancers), and thoracic oncology (lung cancer, thymic cancer).

Awards And Honours

Medical Education