About us
We are a cancer research lab at St Vincent's Institute in Melbourne Australia.
We study familial cancer syndromes that cause predisposition to breast/ovarian cancer, leukaemias and other solid tumours. These families inherit a defect in the ability to maintain genome stability – their cells accumulate mutations at a faster rate, and thus cancer occurs earlier in life with a higher probability. This mechanism of genome stability is intricate and involves a number of signaling and DNA repair pathways. We are beginning to reconstitute these pathways biochemically using recombinant proteins and synthetic DNA molecules to understand how they function and how they could be targeted with new types of cancer drugs. We also study the chemotherapeutic sensitivity of human tumour cell lines that have defects in maintaining genome stability. |
