Associate Professor John SP Yuen, currently Head and Senior Consultant, Department of Urology, studied Medicine at the University of Melbourne on an Australian Government scholarship and graduated with the Bachelor of Medicine; Bachelor of Surgery (M.B; BS) degree in 1996. He underwent advanced urological training in Singapore where he obtained his Master Degree in Medicine (Surgery) from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh in 2000. He was admitted as a Fellow of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore and Member, Chapter of Urologist of the College of Surgeons, Singapore in 2004.
Dr Yuen is a Senior Consultant Urological Surgeon in the Department of Urology, Singapore General Hospital (SGH) with a special clinical interest in robotic and laparoscopic surgery to treat urological cancers (prostate, kidney, bladder, testicular and penile cancers). He underwent robotic and laparoscopic training at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, New York, USA and the University of Strasbourg, France where he obtained a diploma in laparoscopic surgery. He subspecialises in uro-oncology and was the Director of Uro-oncology (2013-2016) in SGH. His practice includes treating other general urological conditions including benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH or prostatism), urinary stone disease and urinary tract infections.
In 2004 he was awarded the prestigious International Fellowship by the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore and funding by the SingHealth Talent Development Funds to pursue a PhD degree at the University of Oxford. His research work, supervised by Professor Val Macaulay, focused on finding new molecular targets to treat patients with advanced kidney cancers. During his time in Oxford, his surgical mentors was Dr Mark Sullivan who specialises in kidney cancer surgery. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Oxford - DPhil (Oxon) – in 2007. Thereafter, he returned to SGH where he has been working as a senior consultant uro-oncological surgeon. He is one of the principal inventors of the patented robotic prostate biopsy device Mona Lisa® (Biobot Surgical, Singapore), which is currently the state-of-the-art transperineal multi-parametric MRI-targeted prostate biopsy technique for early prostate cancer detection. He received international and regional recognition in the fields of early prostate cancer diagnosis and minimally-invasive surgical techniques (da Vinci robotic and laparoscopic surgery) for treating urological cancers, and research in advanced kidney cancers. He pioneered advanced robotic surgical techniques such as performing robotic-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RARP) totally outside the abdominal cavity that allows quick recovery such that patients only requires a short overnight-stay in hospital (ambulatory robotic prostatectomy with extended recovery).
His contributions in these advanced robotic surgical techniques had been published in international peer-reviewed journals (publication reference no. 3, 7, 12, 13, 17). He had also been invited to conduct workshops and lectures in Europe (European Association of Urology – EAU Congress 2015, Madrid), China, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and Singapore. Beside clinical work, he took up administrative duties and serves in various hospital committees. In 2014, he completed the Healthcare Emerging Leadership Program (ELP) conducted by the Healthcare Leadership College, MOH Holdings, Singapore. He was an active member of the Chapter of Urologists, Academy of Medicine, Singapore; and Singapore Urological Association (SUA) where he served as an executive committee member (2009-2010). He was the Organising Chairman for Urofair (2018); and the second Asia-Pacific Preceptorship Program in Prostate Cancer (2011). He was an organising committee and scientific committee member respectively for the 19th Asian Congress of Surgery/1st SingHealth Surgical Congress (2013), and the Urological Associations of Asia (UAA) Congress (2016), in Singapore.
Dr Yuen continues to be actively involved in urological translational research to develop new and more effective treatments for patients with urological cancers. He leads a research group in the Department of Urology, focusing on novel molecular treatments for kidney cancer and diagnostic tests for early detection of prostate cancer. In addition, he collaborates extensively with other established researchers in this field at the NUS, Duke-NUS, National Cancer Centre, the Genome Institute of Singapore at Biopolis, the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford. He is currently a Principal Investigator in kidney cancer research funded by research grants from the Millennium Research Fund, SingHealth; the National Kidney Foundation and the National Medical Research Council, Singapore. His research findings were published in international peer-review journals, including Oncogene, Genome Medicine, Clinical Cancer Research, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, British Journal of Cancer, Journal of Urology and International Journal of Urology, among others. Some of his pioneered robotic, laparoscopic and endoscopic surgical techniques have been published in the Urology Video Journal and Videourology (Journal of Endourology).
Dr Yuen is also actively involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. He supervises PhD- and Master-degree candidatures at the NUS. He holds teaching appointments with the Yong Loo Lin (YLL) School of Medicine NUS, and the Duke-NUS Medical School Singapore (Clinical Associate Professor). He is also an examiner for the Final MBBS examination for the NUS YLL School of Medicine and was the Chairman of the National Urology Exit Examination Committee (2014 - 2015).
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