Garvan Institute of Medical Research Sydney, Australia
Senior Principal Research Fellow and co-Leader of the Cancer Ecosystems Program in the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney Australia Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, UNSW Sydney Leadership Fellow National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia
Decoding breast cancer cellular microenvironments to discover new biomarkers and treatments for aggressive disease.
Despite the availability of numerous new treatments for breast cancer, many patients experience clinical recurrence, caused by acquired or innate resistance of their cancer to treatment. Dr. Swarbrick’s work aims to identify patients at high risk of recurrence and discover the cellular mechanisms responsible for drug resistance.
Some breast cancer patients receive a course of treatment such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy, prior to surgical removal of the tumor, known as neoadjuvant therapy. This type of treatment allows doctors to observe response to drug treatment. Dr. Swarbrick and his team are developing new genetics technologies that will map the activities in the tumor environment to understand how different cellular features relate to the effectiveness of the treatment.
In the coming year, the team will generate data from patient samples using their cutting-edge technology to better understand changes in breast cancer microenvironment induced by treatment. They will identify recurring molecular and cellular programs associated with response or resistance to neoadjuvant therapy. In parallel, they are comparing their findings from human tissue to experiments in laboratory models.
“If not for BCRF, my research could not quickly adapt to new technologies and ideas in our search for better breast cancer treatments.”
Alexander Swarbrick, PhD completed his PhD at University of New South Wales, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with Nobel Laureate J. Michael Bishop at UC San Francisco. Dr. Swarbrick studies breast cancers as complex cellular ecosystems, aiming to understand the way that cellular interactions impact tumor behavior. He is a leader in the application of single-cell & spatially-resolved ’omics to human disease, which he uses to discover new ways to predict the behavior of a patient’s cancer and novel treatments for patients unlikely to benefit from established therapies. Dr Swarbrick is chair of the Cancer Council NSW cancer research committee and co-convenor of the Australian Translational Breast Cancer Research Symposium.
2023
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