Dr Ben Kong

Dr Ben Kong is a Senior Research Fellow in Poor Outcomes Cancers within SPHERE Cancer Clinical Academic Group. He is appointed as a Medical Oncologist at Prince of Wales Hospital where he treats patients with lung and head and neck cancers. He is also a Research Fellow at the NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre where he is responsible for the design and conduct of investigator-initiated cancer clinical trials with the Co-operative Group for Neuro-Oncology (COGNO). 

Prior to joining SPHERE, he completed his PhD in Cancer Immunology within the Dendritic Cell Research Group at the ANZAC Research Institute with Professor Derek Hart, characterising circulating dendritic cells in patients with glioblastoma and developing pre-clinical studies examining combination immune checkpoint inhibitors with dendritic cell vaccination using CMV as a model tumour antigen. He is currently leading clinical research in lung cancer and brain metastases with the aim of extending this into translational research in cancers affecting the central nervous system to develop more effective treatments in brain cancer. 

Ben is a member of the UNSW Australian Centre for NanoMedicine and a mentor with UNSW Founders Health10x and Biotech Accelerator Programmes.