Vision
Take cutting edge genomics research and develop it into services that will both drive translation of biomedical research – particularly relating to the development of new therapeutics and clinical trials; and integrate into clinical practice to provide direct benefit to patients.
Program Co-Leads
Associate Professor Paul Leo
Associate Professor Paul Leo is the Deputy Director of Genomics at the Australian Translational Genomics Centre. The Australian Translational Genomics Centre is a collaborative project between Princess Alexandria Hospital, Queensland Pathology and QUT that provides personalised medicine to cancer patients using Next Generation sequencing technologies. In that capacity Paul supervises five bioinformaticians and liaises with clinical staff at the Princess Alexandria Hospital on clinical report interpretation.
Paul’s research interests focus on the application of genomic technologies to human diseases. This has led to the discovery of new causative genes in monogenic diseases and genes that contribute to disease risk in cervical cancer, osteoporosis and ankylosing spondylitis. Currently his research interests include the identification for driver genes in non-melanoma skin cancers and blood cancers.
View Associate Professor Paul Leo’s profile
Dr Jonathan Ellis
Dr Jonathan Ellis is a bioinformatician and, a senior research fellow at Queensland University of Technology. His research is focused on human genetics in diseases, and, in particular, cancer. He has expertise in high throughput sequencing, particularly in regard to gene expression studies and identification of somatic events in cancers. He is also a member of the Australian Translational Genomics Centre where his main focus is the development and building of systems to analyse human cancer samples. View Dr Jonathan Ellis’s profile
Program Summary
Pharmacogenomics studies the genetic causes in differences to drug dosages observed in patient populations, and the ability to understand these differences can help reduce, among other things, adverse drug reactions. The ultimate goal of the Translational and Pharmacogenomics Research Program is to translate research outcomes into clinical practises that improve patient wellbeing through improved accuracy and reduced cost and time in diagnosis; clinical data available to inform treatment selection and predict treatment response; and patient identification and/or stratification to improve clinical trial outcomes.
This Program will build on the existing state of the art translational genomics services and ongoing research in translational genomics. Program members have a major focus on pharmacogenomics in collaboration with industry partners and have years of experience in producing and analysing genomics data that is directly applicable to pharmacogenomics and using this to develop testing services directly within Health Services. These tests have the potential to benefit every patient in the health system.