Dr Ashley Hopkins   

Senior Research Fellow (Clinical Cancer Epidemiology Lab)  

 

Dr Ashley Hopkin’s research is helping improve outcomes for patients with cancer by advocating for improved pharmaceutical data transparency and unlocking insights to novel precision medicine strategies. His training as a pharmacist and subsequent Honors project gave him firsthand experiences that medicines are not equally effective for all patients, which he investigated further during his PhD.  His research now focuses on bringing together data from clinical trials and electronic health records, to provide evidence on the right medicine for the right patient – with a particular focus on optimal anticancer medicine use. 

“After completing my Honors, I worked in a hospital for a year to get my pharmacy registration, and then working part-time came back and did a PhD with my Honors supervisor.” Ash’s motivation for undertaking a PhD initially was a desire to continue to be able to help the community but also expand career opportunities as a pharmacist. “As a pharmacist in the hospital, I recognized doing a PhD as a mechanism to be involved in clinical trials and drug development. The PhD opened my options to a range of work that I was interested in and wanted to do.  It’s lead me to what I do today; improving patient outcomes by establishing a research group to enhance our ability for change, teaching others, developing processes, and lobbying for data transparency.” Based on the skills acquired during his PhD and the helpful guidance of mentors, Ash was awarded a National Breast Cancer Foundation Fellowship. “This fellowship enabled me to initially focus on breast cancer research and work with Lilly, Roche, and Novartis to try and optimize the use of CDK4/6 inhibitors. Today I lead a research group which works with data from many pharmaceutical companies, where we aim to identify precision dosing strategies for many medicines across many cancer types.” 

 

Ashley’s social media 

Twitter: @pmg_flinders