Jane Visvader | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Alma mater | University of Adelaide |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Salk Institute |
Jane Visvader FRS FAA FAHMS is a scientist specialising in breast cancer research who works for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. She is the joint head of the Breast Cancer Laboratory with Geoff Lindeman. [1]
Visvader holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Adelaide having studied structure and function of citrus exocortis viroid [2]
After her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher with Inder Verma (Salk Institute, San Diego) and Jerry Adams (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI)). [3] She worked at the Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston before returning to Victoria in 1997 to establish a Breast Cancer Laboratory at WEHI. [4]
Visvader has published work investigating the role of cells of origin in cancer [5] and in particular focuses on the role of stem cells, [6] [7] which she believes may be a key to understanding breast cancer. [8]
Visvader is a named inventor on five patents relating to cancer research focused on stem cell isolation and diagnostics. [9]
WEHI, previously known as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, and as the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, is Australia's oldest medical research institute. Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who won the Nobel Prize in 1960 for his work in immunology, was director from 1944 to 1965. Burnet developed the ideas of clonal selection and acquired immune tolerance. Later, Professor Donald Metcalf discovered and characterised colony-stimulating factors. As of 2015, the institute hosted more than 750 researchers who work to understand, prevent and treat diseases including blood, breast and ovarian cancers; inflammatory diseases (autoimmunity) such as rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and coeliac disease; and infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV and hepatitis B and C.
Jerry McKee Adams, FAA, FRS is an Australian-American molecular biologist whose research into the genetics of haemopoietic differentiation and malignancy, led him and his wife, Professor Suzanne Cory, to be the first two scientists to pioneer gene cloning techniques in Australia, and to successfully clone mammalian genes.
Donald Metcalf AC FRS FAA was an Australian medical researcher who spent most of his career at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. In 1954 he received the Carden Fellowship from the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria; while he officially retired in 1996, he continued working and held his fellowship until his retirement in December 2014.
Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are cancer cells that possess characteristics associated with normal stem cells, specifically the ability to give rise to all cell types found in a particular cancer sample. CSCs are therefore tumorigenic (tumor-forming), perhaps in contrast to other non-tumorigenic cancer cells. CSCs may generate tumors through the stem cell processes of self-renewal and differentiation into multiple cell types. Such cells are hypothesized to persist in tumors as a distinct population and cause relapse and metastasis by giving rise to new tumors. Therefore, development of specific therapies targeted at CSCs holds hope for improvement of survival and quality of life of cancer patients, especially for patients with metastatic disease.
Geron Corporation is a biotechnology company located in Foster City, California, which specializes in developing and commercializing therapeutic products for cancer that inhibit telomerase.
John Edgar Dick is Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Biology, Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network and Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto in Canada. Dick is credited with first identifying cancer stem cells in certain types of human leukemia. His revolutionary findings highlighted the importance of understanding that not all cancer cells are the same and thus spawned a new direction in cancer research. Dick is also known for his demonstration of a blood stem cell's ability to replenish the blood system of a mouse, his development of a technique to enable an immune-deficient mouse to carry and produce human blood, and his creation of the world's first mouse with human leukemia.
Richard G. Pestell AO, FRACP, FACP, is an Australian Oncologist and Endocrinologist who is Distinguished Professor, Translational Medical Research, and the President of the Pennsylvania Cancer and Regenerative Medicine Research Center at the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute. He was previously Executive Vice President of Thomas Jefferson University and Director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, US (2005-2015). Pestell was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours for distinguished service to medicine, and to medical education, as a researcher and physician in the fields of Endocrinology and Oncology.
Suzanne Cory is an Australian molecular biologist. She has worked on the genetics of the immune system and cancer and has lobbied her country to invest in science. She is married to fellow scientist Jerry Adams, also a WEHI scientist, whom she met while studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, England.
Terence Paul "Terry" Speed, FAA FRS is an Australian statistician. A senior principal research scientist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, he is known for his contributions to the analysis of variance and bioinformatics, and in particular to the analysis of microarray data.
LIM domain transcription factor LMO4 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the LMO4 gene.
StAR-related lipid transfer protein 10 (STARD10) or PCTP-like protein is a lipid transfer protein that in humans is encoded by the STARD10 gene. The protein derives its name from the fact that the molecule contains a START domain. As part of the StarD2 subfamily, StarD10 can transport the lipids phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine between membranes in solution. Casein kinase II phosphorylates the protein on its serine at position 184.
Rosetta Martiniello-Wilks is an Australian cancer researcher and the current president of the Australasian Gene and Cell Therapy Society. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Medical and Molecular Biosciences at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Ultimo, Sydney, Australia. Martiniello-Wilks is a core member of the Centre for Health Technologies at UTS and head of the Translational Cancer Research Group in the School of Medical and Molecular Biosciences, Faculty of Science, UTS.
Geoffrey John McLachlan FAA is an Australian researcher in computational statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition. McLachlan is best known for his work in classification and finite mixture models. He is the joint author of five influential books on the topics of mixtures and classification, as well as their applications. Currently, McLachlan is a Professor of statistics within the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland.
Sarah-Jane Dawson is an Australian clinician-scientist. She is a consultant medical oncologist and head of the Molecular Biomarkers and Translational Genomics Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. Her current research interests are focused on the development of noninvasive blood-based biomarkers for clinical application, including early detection, risk stratification and disease monitoring in cancer management.
Dr. Fayaz Ahmad Malik is an Indian pharmacologist, cancer biologist and a scientist at the Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He is known for his studies on investigating the regulatory mechanisms of Cancer Stem Cells during tumor metastasis. His studies also involve the identification of signaling networks conferring resistance to current anti-cancer therapies. His discovery of new anticancer agents holds a number of patents for the processes he has developed. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to Biosciences, in 2014.
Ann Tsukamoto, is an inventor and stem cell researcher. While working at SyStemix in the early 90s, Tsukamoto and her colleagues, Yukoh Aihara, Charles M. Baum, and Irving Weissman, made a vital breakthrough in cancer research when they isolated blood-forming stem cells. Consequently, they received a patent for their isolation technique of human hematopoietic stem cells in 1991. She holds 12 patents related to human hematopoietic stem cells, pancreatic stem cells, and human neural stem cells. She is married to research colleague Irving Weissman.
Alan Frederick Cowman is an Australian medical researcher. He is the head of the division of infection and immunity at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne, where he specializes in researching the parasites that cause malaria. In 2019 he was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia for his "eminent service to the biological sciences".
Professor Susan J. Clark is an Australian biomedical researcher in epigenetics of development and cancer. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2015, and is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Principal Research Fellow and Research Director and Head of Genomics and Epigenetics Division at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. Clark developed the first method for bisulphite sequencing for DNA methylation analysis and used it to establish that the methylation machinery of mammalian cells is capable of both maintenance and de novo methylation at CpNpG sites and showed is inheritable. Clark's research has advanced understanding of the role of DNA methylation, non-coding RNA and microRNA in embryogenesis, reprogramming, stem cell development and cancer and has led to the identification of epigenomic biomarkers in cancer. Clark is a founding member of the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) and President of the Australian Epigenetics Alliance (AEpiA).
Caroline E. Ford is an Australian scientist at the University of New South Wales and advocate for women in science. Her research aims to understand why gynaecological cancers develop, how they spread and how best to treat them, and she leads the Gynaecological Cancer Research Group at the University of New South Wales, which was established in 2010.
Jennifer Anne Byrne is a Professor of Molecular Oncology at University of Sydney, Australia. Byrne is notable for not only her cancer research, but the uncovering of academic fraud and junk science in cancer research.
