Children's Cancer Institute

Biography

Professor Louis Chesler joined Children’s Cancer Institute as Executive Director in December 2025.

Since Louis completed his PhD and MD at Northwestern University and Medical School in Chicago, and a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, USA his career has spanned several prestigious appointments at some of the world’s leading childhood cancer research institutes and hospitals.

He trained in paediatric oncology clinically and in research at the University of California, San Francisco and Oakland Children’s Hospital. His research initially focused on modelling the development of solid and brain tumours (neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma) and on targeting the oncogene MYCN. He then moved to the UK, where he became and an honorary paediatric oncology consultant at The Royal Marsden Hospital, and a Professor of Childhood Cancer Biology and Therapeutics at The Institute of Cancer Research in London, one of the world’s leading academic medical cancer research institutes, leading a program in childhood cancer therapeutics and clinical trials development, again with a focus on neuroblastoma, brain tumours and high-risk paediatric cancers.

He most recently founded and led the Paediatric Oncology Experimental Medicine (POEM) Centre at the ICR. POEM has led internationally the development of first-in-child therapeutics, and biomarker-rich experimental and precision medicine clinical trials. POEM also grew to host several flagship research and clinical programmes, including the UK’s national child cancer personalised medicine program known as Stratified Medicine Paediatrics, the ICR Paediatric Cancer Modelling and Preclinical Therapeutics Hospital, the Paediatric Cancer Modelling Programme of the MRC National Mouse Genomics Network, and a NIH/CRUK Grand Challenge in Paediatric Cancer Drug Development (PROTECT).

Most recently his work has focused on the development of novel immune-priming therapies, protein degrading cancer drugs, and degrader programmed CAR T cells, now in first-in-child clinical trials in the UK and entering experimental trials internationally.

Louis’s collaborations extend across the globe. He is passionate about laboratory research that produces lasting clinical benefit to children with cancer. Louis’s background as a dually trained clinician specialist and bench scientist prepared him for a lifelong career focused on continually challenging assumptions about what clinical medicine can deliver now and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the future. This approach and these principles are the core mission of the Minderoo Children's Comprehensive Cancer Centre (MCCCC), the Institute’s new home in 2026, which represents a new era of collaboration between clinicians and scientists that promises to transform experiences and outcomes for children with cancer and their families, through kinder and fundamentally more effective treatments.