Reprogramming the Brain Tumor Microenvironment to Enhance Anti-Tumor Immunity

Theo is head of the Brain Cancer Biology & Tumour Microenvironment Laboratory, at The University of Melbourne. He completed his PhD at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, then moved to the German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg, as a postdoctoral researcher where he generated various conditional mutant and Cre-recombinase transgenic mice targeting several regions in the brain. He then joined Rob Ramsay's laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer, where he was the first to demonstrate that MYB has a critical role in brain development. He was a research academic for 3 years at Monash UniCam MIPS before undertaking a Marie Curie Fellowship for 3 years as a part of European Union Greek-German research program, at the University of Patras in Greece. In 2011 he returned to Melbourne and has been head of the Brain Cancer Biology & Tumour Microenvironment Laboratory since. Using cutting edge technology, his research aims to understand how CREB regulates brain tumour growth, and through the development of novel mouse brain tumour models, his laboratory has shown that the PI3K-CREB signalling-transcription axis regulates brain tumour cell proliferation and differentiation, and that targeting CREB attenuates malignancy. More recently, his laboratory has focussed on spatial mapping of the brain tumour microenvironment, investigating tumour remodelling and cell signalling heterogeneity.