Several members of the Precision Medicine group

L>R Back row: joint leaders Prof Michael Sorich and Dr Andrew Rowland, Dr Ashley Hopkins

Front row: Reham Mounzer, Madelé van Dyk, Warit Ruanglertboon

The Precision Medicine group is jointly led by Prof Michael Sorich and Dr Andrew Rowland. It comprises one post-doctoral research fellow (Dr Ashley Hopkins – National Breast Cancer Foundation Research Fellowship), one research officer (Madelé van Dyk), one data manager (Sasha Zhang), two research higher degrees students (Reham Mounzer and Warit Ruanglertboon), and an honours student (Suphaneela Sivakumaran). The group collaborates extensively with other Flinders, national and international academics, and clinical, industry and patient advocacy groups to address the challenges of getting the right dose of the right medicine to optimally treat cancer.  Prominent local collaborators include Prof Ross McKinnon, Prof John Miners, Prof Chris Karapetis, Prof Peter Mackenzie, and Dr Robin Meech. Prominent industry collaborators include Dr Tom Polasek from Certara, and Drs David Rodrigues and Jean-Claude Marshall from Pfizer Worldwide R&D.

Major achievements in the past two years include the inclusion of two manuscripts informing the selection of medicines for the treatment of colon cancer in prestigious NCCN cancer guidelines, and four manuscripts that have received “ISI highly cited” status as publications cited in the top 1% for the academic fields of “Biology and Biochemistry” and “Clinical Medicine”.