Goh Hak Su Professor in Colorectal Surgery

Professor Iain Tan Bee Huat

Goh Hak Su Professor in Colorectal Surgery, April 2023 - Current

SingHealth Duke-NUS Oncology Academic Clinical Programme

Senior Consultant, Division of Medical Oncology, National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS)

Deputy Group Chief Medical Informatics Officer (Research), SingHealth and Director, Research, Division of Medical Oncology, NCCS

Director, NCCS Satellite STR Biobank

Achievements in Research

Professor Iain Tan Bee Huat is a Clinician Scientist (2 x NMRC CSA & 1x NMRC CSA-SI awardee), and a medical oncologist focusing on colorectal cancer. His research focuses on defining the molecular and biological subtypes of colorectal cancer and their impact on clinical phenotypes including transition from pre-malignant to invasive cancer, propensity to metastasize and response to immune, targeted and chemo-therapies. The emphasis is to exploit the unique biology of each colorectal cancer subtype, enabling development of tailored diagnostic and therapeutic tools for subtype-specific diagnosis, prevention and treatment. His cross-disciplinary research across clinical and scientific specialities is conducted in pre-clinical, translational studies and clinical trials. He has published more than 100 publications, (h-index 43) including first or senior/corresponding author publications in Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and Journal of Clinical Oncology. He has obtained numerous individual competitive grants, corresponding principal investigator of a national collaborative grant on cancer liquid biopsies (IAF-PP, Calibre) and is the co-investigator, theme or platform PI of other national collaborative projects. More recently, his research is moving into public health research in cancer. He has research leadership roles in National Cancer Centre Singapore, Singapore General Hospital and Singhealth. Nationally, he is platform co-lead for tissue bank & databases (Platform 2) and population health and impact (Platform 5) for Singapore Translational Cancer Consortium (STCC) for Consortium for Clinical Research and Innovation, Singapore (CRIS), Ministry Of Health (MOH), Singapore. For his research, he has received the ASCO Young Investigator Award (2010) and ASCO Merit Award (2011) and National Youth Award (2014), the country’s highest award for youths.

Educating the Next Generation of Clinicians and Scientists

Apart from his outstanding research achievements, Professor Tan mentored extensively. He is mentor to National University of Singapore, DUKE-NUS Medical School and graduate students. He also contributes substantially within our SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre (AMC) where he serves as a lead mentor for clinician scientists in the Centre for Clinician-Scientist Development (CCSD) programme. Besides guiding many clinician researchers, as Research Director in the division of medical oncology at National Cancer Centre Singapore. He works across the Singhealth family, working very closely with Surgery ACP to mentor and groom many young surgeons across surgery (e.g. Dr. Isaac Seow, Dr. Lionel Chen, Dr. Johnny Ong, Dr. Frederick Koh, Dr. Ian Wee) to become academic surgeons and clinician investigators across the spectrum of colorectal cancer research.

Professor Tan believes strongly that science must be used to both improve fundamental knowledge and also to be applied to improve human health. There are urgent medical needs that must be addressed. Thus, training clinicians and scientists of the future requires personal mentorship. In this way, a doctor can impact more lives that the patients he/she takes care of and a scientist can use discoveries to serve society. He also believes that personal mentorship is crucial. This 1 to 1 mentorship allows imparting of knowledge, attitudes and skills and monitoring of progress of the individual constant feedback. It also allows the talent of the mentee to blossom. "Research is a team sport. Using science and research purposefully to address important clinical questions and needs, guiding the next generation and working in teams across disciplines is impactful and meaningful" says Professor Tan.

Goh Hak Su Professorship in Colorectal Surgery

Prof Ivy Ng

SingHealth GCEO