Professor Tony Ng

Tony Ng is the Joint Head of School of Cancer & Pharmaceutical Sciences, Richard Dimbleby Professor of Cancer Research, King’s College London and Professor of Molecular Oncology at University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute. He has a mix of training/expertise in medicine, immunology, cancer cell biology, biochemistry, optical imaging and cell biophysics. Most recently he has also expanded his imaging repertoire to the development of radionuclide imaging tracers against targeted molecules.

He has directed the CRUK-funded KCL-UCL Comprehensive Cancer Imaging Centre since 2008. The central mission is to deliver a coherent & translationally oriented Imaging-OMIC combination approach for clinical studies. Tissue and circulating exosome-based omics have been combined successfully with the use of clinical imaging to individualise cancer treatment, especially in the context of human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER) targeted treatments. His team has recently shown in a Phase II head and neck anti-HER cancer therapy trial, that exosomal HER receptor measurements, which present a new way of following this receptor rewiring mechanism, can contribute significantly to the prediction of favourable treatment response as measured by CT (RECIST) (ASCO. (2018), Journal of Clinical Oncology 36: Suppl 6043).

In addition, he leads the Tumour Immunology imaging project within the Breast Cancer Now Unit at KCL. He is also the Joint lead for the Cross-Disciplinary approaches enhancing biotherapeutics Theme of the newly formed UCL-Barts-King’s-Crick CRUK Major Centre/City of London Centre. His team demonstrated in breast and lung cancers that exosomal PD-L1 is part of a tightly regulated immune surveillance mechanism linking exosomal measurements in the blood to direct cell-cell immunosuppressive interactions (Cell reports. 2018;24:630-641).

For his multidisciplinary research contribution in cancer, he was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences as a Fellow (FMedSci) in 2013 and was elected as a Fellow of the European Academy of Cancer Sciences in 2017.