UNSW Medicine are excited to announce that Professor Chris Heeschen has joined the Cancer CAG on March 1 under the SHARP program.

Through Strategic Hires and Retention Pathways (SHARP), supporting strategic recruitment in carefully selected areas of research, Professor Heeschen and a team of highly successful researchers have joined UNSW Sydney from the Barts Cancer Institute in London.
 
He will join the School of Medical Sciences in UNSW Medicine. The SHARP package will enable recruitment of several skilled technical, professional and academic personnel to UNSW under Professor Heeschen’s leadership, to be housed across the Randwick and Liverpool campuses.
 
On Thursday 8 March at 11am Professor Heeschen will present the Lowy Seminar on Novel precision medicine approaches for pancreatic cancer stem cells. The seminar will be held at the Level 4 Lowy Seminar Room.
 
Professor Heeschen runs an integrated basic and translational research program, with a particular focus on pancreatic cancer as a disease with clear unmet medical need. He has a strong track record in innovative, investigator-initiated clinical trials and has developed numerous biomarkers that have been successfully applied for precision medicine and implemented into clinical guidelines. Building on his original discovery of pancreatic cancer stem cells and the heterogeneity therein, his lab subsequently identified key epigenetic and metabolic regulators of their stemness signalling network. Making use of his extensive international network of clinical investigators, industry partners and funding agencies, several innovative clinical trials have just been opened (SU2C and EU funded).
 
At UNSW he will continue dissecting the cellular heterogeneity and hierarchy of pancreatic cancer down to single cells and determining the underlying molecular mechanisms. Professor Heeschen will develop new and personalised therapies to more efficiently target cancer, including the contained stem cells as the most tumorigenic subset.
 
With his strong track record building and leading international and multi-disciplinary teams across academia and industry, we welcome Professor Heeschen to the partnership and contributing to fast-track testing of novel treatment approaches in next-generation biomarker-driven clinical trials for cancer therapy.