About us
We are a medical research lab at St Vincent's Institute in Melbourne Australia. Our lab is focused on how cells repair damage to DNA. Our research on this topic has two main goals:
1. understanding how damage to DNA predisposes to cancer, and can be targeted in cancer therapies and 2. understanding how DNA repair pathways can be manipulated to improve the process of gene editing. More information on our goals in gene editing below: Our team studies 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 processes. We are reconstitute DNA repair processes 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 application of genome editing to treatment of genetic disorders, by commandeering the DNA damage response to repair CRISPR-mediated breaks. |
