Dr Lewis Au is a Medical Oncologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Neeson Lab), with a focus on kidney cancer.

He obtained his undergraduate medical degree from The University of Melbourne in 2009, and his Medical Oncology specialist qualification in 2017. From 2017-2022, he worked in London at The Royal Marsden Hospital as a Clinical Research Fellow, and as a Translational Research Scientist at The Francis Crick Institute.

While abroad, Lewis obtained a PhD on Cancer Genomics and Tumour Immunology through the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). His work focused on predictive biomarkers of immunotherapy treatment response in patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer), through in-depth analyses of patient tumour samples obtained from clinical trials.

In 2020, he co-established and conducted the CAPTURE study, which became the largest study globally to prospectively evaluate the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 vaccines in cancer patients. This research provided insights on factors leading to higher morbidity and mortality in cancer patients, and reasons for a reduced functional immune response to COVID-19 vaccines particularly against SARS-CoV-2 variants as the pandemic evolved.

His research has led to high-impact co-first author scientific publications including in The Lancet, Nature Medicine, Nature Cancer, and Cancer Cell. His discovery of the link between anti-PD-1 treatment response and intratumoural T cell receptor sequences in kidney cancer was awarded the Best Fundamental Research Prize by the European Association of Urology in 2023.

He is the recipient of the 2019 Cecile and Ken Youner IKCC Scholarship, the 2022 Chairman’s Prize for outstanding PhD thesis by the ICR, and the 2023 Discovery Partner Fellowship Award by The Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation.

He is an ESMO Faculty Member of Translational Research for 2022-2026.