Australian Cancer & Metabolism Meeting 2024

Dr M. Celeste Simon is the Scientific Director of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute and an Associate Director of the Cancer Center at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Simon's research is focused on how cells sense and respond to changes in the availability of molecular oxygen and nutrients. This affects normal development, physiology, and numerous diseases, such as the growth of solid tumors.

The Simon Laboratory is studying how O₂ sensing impacts tumor inflammation, metabolism, metastasis, and overall disease progression. Dr Simon accesses animal models and cancer patient samples with the goal of developing novel strategies to treat tumors such as pancreatic cancer, soft tissue sarcoma, hepatocellular carcinoma, and renal cancer.

She was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator for twenty years, and has received numerous awards recognizing her research, including the Fouad Bashour Award for Distinguished Physiologists, Stanley N. Cohen Award for Biomedical Research, and Elliot Osserman Award from the Israel Cancer Research Fund. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014), and the National Academy of Medicine (2018). She received an NCI Outstanding Investigator Award in 2017 and was named a Fellow of the AACR Academy in 2021. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2021), named the AACR-G.H.A. Clowes Award for Outstanding Basic Cancer Research (2023), and received a FASEB Lifetime Achievement Award for her research, leadership, and mentoring. In 2023, she was named an HHMI Emeritus Investigator.

Johan(nes) Swinnen is professor at the University of Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) in Belgium, former chair of the Department of Oncology and Vice-chair of the Leuven Cancer Institute. 

He is director of the KU Leuven Lipidomics Core Facility Lipometrix. Johan has a long-standing interest in the rewiring of lipid metabolism in cancer and other complex diseases. 

To map the heterogeneity of alterations in lipid metabolism, he employs and combines various lipidomics and other spatial and bulk omics approaches. His main focus is on the discovery and exploitation of lipid-related vulnerabilities to enhance therapy response in the context of personalised precision medicine.

Dr. David P. Labbé is an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery, Division of Urology at McGill University and a 2016 Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator. He is also an Associate Member of the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre and a Scientist at the Research Institute of the MUHC (Cancer Research Program). 

Initially trained as a Food Scientist (Université Laval), Dr. Labbé was initiated to cancer research during his M.Sc. under Dr. Richard Béliveau (Université du Québec à Montréal). Dr. Labbé completed his doctoral education in the Department of Experimental Medicine at McGill University under Dr. Michel L. Tremblay, where he studied the role of protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B in prostate cancer using genetically engineered mouse models. Dr. Labbé performed his postdoctoral training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Harvard Medical School with Dr. Myles Brown where he worked on diet-induced epigenetic reprogramming and aggressive prostate cancer.

Dr. Labbé’s laboratory relies on high-throughput experiments, bioinformatics analyses, animal models and patient-derived tissues to uncover the basis to aggressive prostate cancer and molecular underpinnings to diet-dependent prostate cancer progression. His overreaching goal is to use precision nutrition to expose vulnerabilities that could be exploited through precision oncology strategies to improve outcomes for men with lethal prostate cancer.

He is the recipient of a 2016 Scholarship for the Next Generation of Scientists from the Cancer Research Society, a 2022 Research Scholar-Junior 2 award from The Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Santé, an Early Career Award in Cancer from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, is a 2022 William Dawson Scholar of McGill University and a 2023 Young Investigator of the Society for Basic Urologic Research.

Marcia C. Haigis is a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology, co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research, and the Director of Gender Equity for Faculty in Science at Harvard Medical School. She obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin and performed postdoctoral studies at MIT studying mitochondrial metabolism.

Dr Haigis is an active member of the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center and the Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School. Her research has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of how mitochondria contribute to human health and diseases of aging. 

Her studies identified that mitochondria mediate metabolic reprogramming in cancer, including identifying nodes of metabolic vulnerability in cancer, as well as identifying metabolic recycling of ammonia to generate amino acids important for tumour growth. Her work has shed light on our understanding of how diet and obesity regulate anti-tumour immunity.

She is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the Brookdale Leadership in Aging Award, the Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar Award, the American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, the National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Program, and the 2023 Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Medicine.

Christian Metallo is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and holds the Daniel and Martina Lewis Chair. He is also an adjunct professor of bio-engineering at UC San Diego.

His laboratory integrates engineering approaches, stable isotope tracing, mass spectrometry, and molecular biology tools to dissect how metabolic dysregulation contributes to human disease. Key focus areas include cancer, macular disease, neurodegeneration, and diabetes.

Christian received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before starting his lab at UC San Diego in 2011. 

He was the recipient of a Searle Scholar Award and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and he is a fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Associate Professor Kristin Brown is a Group Leader in the Cancer Biology and Therapeutics Program at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology at the University of Melbourne.

Following the award of her PhD from the University of Otago in 2009, Kristin completed postdoctoral training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School. Her research focused on oncogenic signalling pathways and mechanisms of therapy resistance in breast cancer (Nature, 2012 and Cell Reports, 2015). This included work demonstrating that therapy-induced reprogramming of cellular metabolism drives chemotherapy resistance (Cancer Discovery, 2017).

In 2016, Kristin relocated to Australia to establish her research laboratory. Her laboratory uses a variety of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology techniques to investigate the fundamental mechanisms contributing to regulation of cellular metabolism, and the impact of aberrant cellular metabolism on tumour initiation and progression (Cancer Discovery, 2021, Developmental Cell, 2022 and PNAS, 2023). This fundamental knowledge is applied to the pre-clinical development of novel and more effective interventions for cancer therapy.

Dr Nirmal Robinson received his Ph.D in 2007 from the University of Bonn, Germany, before conducting his postdoctoral research at the National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa. 

During this time, he deciphered the role of type-I interferons in regulating necroptotic cell death. He was the recipient of the DFG-CECAD Fellowship and joined as an independent Group Leader at the CECAD Research Centre, University of Cologne in 2012. His research interests lie in understanding the molecular mechanisms that link metabolism and cellular stress responses in cancer and inflammation.

Since the beginning of 2018 he is leading the Cellular Stress and Immune Signalling Lab at the Centre for Cancer Biology, University of South Australia. He publishes extensively in influential journals and is regularly invited to present nationally and internationally. He actively contributes as a peer reviewer to a number of journals, international grants and serves on the editorial board of Cell Death and Disease.

Prof Lisa Butler, University of Adelaide/SAHMRI
Adelaide, SA

A/Prof Luke Seth, Flinders University
Adelaide, SA

A/Prof Daniel Thomas, University of Adelaide/SAHMRI
Adelaide, SA

Dr Nirmal Robinson, UniSA
Adelaide, SA