Mr Kelvin Lau is Clinical Director and Consultant Thoracic Surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. He qualified in Oxford University where he also completed a PhD on antivascular targeting. He was awarded the only cardiothoracic surgery national training post in 2006. His training took him to pioneering centres in the world, including the Royal Brompton, Edinburgh, Leicester and Hong Kong. He went on to complete a keyhole surgery fellowship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong where he was honorary assistant professor. In 2011 he was awarded the Robert Ginsberg lectureship by the IASLC for his work establishing the relationship between specialist thoracic surgeons and resection rates.
On return to the UK, he was appointed the first consultant thoracic surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital to set up a new thoracic surgery service. He introduced VATS lobectomy and then established the largest robotic thoracic surgery programme in the UK with 2 daily thoracic-dedicated robotic surgery theatres, enabling them to achieve the highest minimally invasive anatomical resection rate and highest segmentectomy rate. It is also the busiest lung volume reduction service in the UK, and until the recent MARS2 trial was the largest mesothelioma surgery centre.
He also established the first image-guided navigation bronchoscopy programme in Europe using cone beam CT, and in 2018 he performed the first lung tumour destruction through bronchosopic microwave ablation. His latest interest is to improve ablation using robotic bronchoscopy. He is principal investigator for NAVIGATE, NAVABLATE, MARS2 and ISI-Ion-EU1 trial. He is also the founder and organiser of the Bronchoscopic Ablation Summit series of conference meetings.
