Dr Choo Su Pin

Dr Choo Su Pin is a medical oncologist at Mount Elizabeth Hospitals, Singapore.

She specialises in gastrointestinal cancers including colorectal, upper gastrointestinal, pancreas, hepatobiliary, peritoneal and anal cancers. She has been practising medicine for more than 20 years.

Prior to joining private practice, Dr Choo was the deputy head of the division of medical oncology and chief of the gastrointestinal cancer department at the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS). She is currently a visiting consultant there.

Dr Choo graduated from the University of Nottingham Medical School, UK. She has fellowships from the Royal College of Physicians, UK and the Academy of Medicine, Singapore, and was trained in medical oncology at NCCS. She was one of a few overseas participants selected to participate in the AACR/ASCO methods in cancer research workshop in Vail, USA. She also did a research fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, USA where she worked on clinical trials for gastrointestinal cancers and undertook laboratory research on understanding neuroendocrine tumours. Dr Choo obtained a Singapore Management University-SingHealth graduate diploma in healthcare management and leadership.

At NCCS, she was a senior consultant in the division of medical oncology and co-director of the liver cancer clinic. She was a driver of many initiatives and was instrumental in setting up the experimental cancer therapeutics unit at NCCS, which focused on drug development and early-phase oncology trials. She has led many clinical trials in gastrointestinal cancers, and was the deputy head of clinical trials and epidemiological sciences department of NCCS, before she became chair of the clinical trials’ steering committee.

Dr Choo also set up the gastrointestinal database at NCCS and was adjunct principal investigator at the SingHealth investigational medicine unit. She is a member of the Asia-Pacific hepatocellular cancer trials workgroup and was in the steering committee for the AHCC006 trial, an international multicentre clinical trial on liver cancer led from Singapore.

Her research areas are pancreatic-hepatobiliary cancers and immuno-oncology. She has received grant awards for her research work as principal investigator and co-investigator. She continues to use her experience in clinical research and currently serves as deputy chair of the SingHealth’s central institutional review board, overseeing approvals of oncology trials in the SingHealth network.

She has published work in journals like Lancet, Nature Genetics, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Annals of Oncology and Cancer Discovery. She has also presented her research work at numerous overseas meetings.

Besides her clinical work, Dr Choo is an adjunct associate professor in the SingHealth Duke-NUS oncology academic clinic programme at Duke-NUS Medical School. She was an adjunct associate professor in the department of medicine at Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

She has also organised numerous oncology conferences including the Best of ASCO in Singapore, Asia-Pacific Liver Cancer Experts Meeting and the Asia-Pacific Gastroenterology Cancer Summit. She was the local chair of the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) Asia conference in Singapore and co-chaired the ESMO preceptorship in gastrointestinal cancers.

Dr Choo serves as the assistant bursar at the Academy of Medicine, Singapore where she is also the honorary secretary of the chapter of medical oncology. She is currently a council member at the Singapore Cancer Society (SCS) and chairs the cancer research committee and the community partnership committee, while also being a member of the community health committee. She was the first female president of the Singapore Society of Oncology (SSO) and was the immediate past-president. She is a founding member of the SSO-cancer immunotherapy consortium.

Internationally, Dr Choo has served on advisory boards of pharmaceutical companies for gastrointestinal cancer drug development and delivered lectures as an invited speaker at both national and international conferences. She continues to teach trainee oncologists and other oncologists in her field of gastrointestinal cancers. She has also been involved in guideline development for cancers including hepatocellular carcinoma and pancreas cancer locally and in the Asia-Pacific region.

She is a faculty member for lower gastrointestinal track in the European Society of Medical Oncology and also serves as a member in the ESMO women for oncology committee, which advocates for women in the field of oncology.

She is a recipient of the Excellent Service Award and the National Covid-19 award.