Rachel Delahunty

Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

Reducing the morbidity and mortality of ovarian cancer through prevention

Rachel Delahunty is a medical oncologist at The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, The Mercy Hospital for Women and Geelong University Hospital. She has a special interest in gynaecological oncology and translational research and recently has her PhD though the university of Melbourne and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre accepted.

Aaron Wong

Department of Medicine, The University of Melbourne, St Vincent’s Hospital

Accelerating Pharmacogenomic Guided Opioid Prescribing into Clinical Practice in Cancer Patients

Dr Aaron K Wong is  dual trained Palliative Care Physiscian and Medical Oncologist. Aaron is a Palliative Care Clinical Trials Lead at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and The Royal Melbourne Hospital, and is completing his PhD on the role of pharmacogenomics on opioid use for the treatment of pain due to advanced cancer.

Amanda Chen

The Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

CRISPR/Cas9 Engineering of Next Generation Armoured CAR T Cells

Amanda Chen is a fourth year PhD student in the Beavis and Darcy laboratories at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. In her PhD, she has developed a novel CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing approach to enhance CAR T cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy that involves the adoptive transfer of engineered T cells into cancer patients. Specifically, this CRISPR/Cas9 editing strategy enables the "armouring" of CAR T cells to express potent immunomodulatory factors in a tumour-localised manner, demonstrating enhanced therapeutic efficacy in preclinical murine models, while maintatining a favourable safety profile. Amanda's work has the potential to improve CAR T cell therapy for the treatment of solid tumours, which currently respond poorly to conventional T cell therapies.