Cancer Seminar Series

Date: Thursday 6 August

Time: 9am - 10am

Zoom ID: 83560212942

Professor Maher Gandhi is the Executive Director of Mater Research, a practising haematologist at Princess Alexandra Hospital and former Leukaemia Foundation Chair of Blood Cancer Research at UQ.
His research interest is the immunobiology of lymphoma, with a strong emphasis on translational patient-orientated biomedical research.

He will present his most recent data, in which he led a large international consortium to provide the first large-scale characterisation of an extremely rare and hitherto un-investigated sub-type of a highly aggressive lymphoma. His results led the development of a novel treatment regimen that is currently in undergoing a world-first Australia-wide clinical trial.

Date: Thursday 9 July

Time: 9am - 10am

Zoom ID: 83560212942

Associate Professor Theresa Hickey is the Scientific Program Leader of the Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories (DRMCRL), Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide and a current National Breast Cancer Foundation Research (NCBF) Fellow.

She is internationally recognised for her research on sex hormone action in female reproductive tissues and disorders, with specific expertise in breast cancer. Theresa has pioneered new treatment strategies for breast cancer and established a patient-derived ex vivo culture methodology as a powerful new pre-clinical tool for drug development. Her group’s innovative work in this area has attracted substantial national and international interest in using the ex vivo culture technique as a pre-clinical model in several different tumour types.

Date: Thursday 11 June

Time: 9am - 10am

Zoom ID: 834 0347 4071

Dr Laura Sormani and Dr Honor Hugo

"CLEC12B : a new player in skin pigmentation and melanoma" presented by Dr Laura Sormani 

"Heparanase promotes Syndecan-1 expression to mediate fibrillar collagen and mammographic density in human breast tissue cultured ex vivo" presented by Dr Honor Hugo

Dr Laura Sormani is a research officer post-doctoral fellow interested in the biology of melanoma genesis and progression. She completed her PhD in 2019 at the Mediterranean Centre for Molecular Medicine (C3M, Côte d’Azur University, Nice, France) under the supervision of Professor Thierry Passeron, a world leading expert in skin pigmentation.  During her PhD she discovered, patented and characterized a novel pigmentation gene CLEC12B demonstrating a key role not only in skin pigmentation but also in melanonagenesis, thereby exerting functions beyond immunity and inflammation. Dr Laura Sormani has recently joined the lab of Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani at the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute as a postdoctoral fellow to work on the molecular pathways involved in melanoma vascularisation.

Dr Honor Hugo (PhD) joined the School of Biomedical Science, Faculty of Health, Queensland University of Technology as a Research Officer and Lecturer in 2016 . As an award winning researcher, Dr Hugo and a team of scientists at QUT, who have active and ongoing connections with industry aim to develop alternate ways of detecting breast density without exposing women to ionizing radiation, as occurs in mammography. The other component of her research focuses on understanding the underlying biological mechanism through which mammographically dense breast tissue increases the risk of developing breast cancer, employing a unique mammary tissue explant approach. Her recent publication defines the use of single-sided NMR technology to determine mammographic density change in this explant model, a world first in this field of research. 

Cancelled

Date: Thursday 19 March

Time: 9am-10am

Venue: Seminar Room 2003

Fiona Simpson leads her cancer research team in the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute and has been working for last 10 years analysing patient and immune responses to monoclonal antibody therapies. Her research program brings together Clinicians, Chemists, Pathologists, cell biologists and immunologists and emphasises the translation of research findings into therapies.  Today she will be discussing her recent high impact manuscript published in Cell.

Date: Thursday 5 March

Seminar: 9am-10am

Venue: Seminar Room 2003

John Hooper leads the Cancer Biology Laboratory at the Mater Research Institute UQ. His research focus is on cancers of the ovary, pancreas, prostate and bowel, studying the molecular drivers of these malignancies and pre-clinical testing of new diagnostic/predictive tools and drug leads. His laboratory works closely with clinical teams involved in the care of cancer patients, and with companies engaged in the translation of biomedical discoveries for clinical use.

Date: Thursday 5 March

Seminar: 9am-10am

Venue: Seminar Room 2003

Dr. Brittney Harrington (NIH, Maryland)

Dr. Brittney Harrington is a Postdoctoral Fellow performing translational research at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, USA. Dr. Harrington completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Queensland, and Mater Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Harrington's research is focused on the discovery of new targeted therapies for ovarian cancer and using clinically relevant models of the disease. 

Date: Tuesday 20 February 

Seminar: 9am-10am

Venue: Seminar Room 2003

Dr Pascal Duijf obtained a Bachelor's degree in Biology and a Master's degree in Medical Biology from the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and was awarded two scholarships that enabled him to gain research experience in cell biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA in the United States. His research focuses on identifying the causes and consequences of genomic instability in the development of cancer (see also 'Research Interests' below for more details). He aims to translate this knowledge into the development of cancer diagnostic, therapeutic and precision medicine approaches. To achieve this, he uses a broad range of methods, including mouse modelling, genome editing, microscopy, cell and molecular biology, molecular pathology, proteomics and computational systems genomics.