Introducing our first Fellowship recipient, Dr Sam Greenall
We're very proud to announce the first recipient of the Ethan Davies Fellowship!
Dr Sam Greenall, from the Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, is an expert in evaluating and testing different drugs and therapies for the treatment of adult and paediatric brain cancers.
He has eight years' experience in this field, and has been successful in identifying new types of therapies and novel strategies for the better treatment of brain cancers. He is also well trained in the establishment and use of clinically relevant forms of patient-derived brain cancer tissue culture.
As our first Ethan Davies Fellow, Dr Greenall will be involved in tackling the problem of getting patient-derived ependymoma to grow in dishes in the laboratory.
At present, the only way to grow these tumours is in mice which, whilst a breakthrough achievement, is not effective for screening hundreds of drugs simultaneously to see which is most active at killing tumour cells.
The Fellowship will allow Dr Greenall to characterise exactly what factors allow ependymoma tumours to grow in patients and mice. Once identified, these factors can then be transferred to a special medium in the laboratory in an attempt to get the tumour cells to grow in a dish. If successful, this research will pave the way for researchers at the Telethon Kids and Hudson Institutes to use cultures to screen drugs rapidly and effectively, quickly identifying any agents that kill ependymoma tumours for transfer into the clinic.
Dr Sam Greenall from the Hudson Institute for Medical Research
Dr Greenall was announced as a winner of the Ethan Davies Fellowship at our official launch on 8 October 2016. If you have any queries regarding Dr Greenall's research, please contact us.