Professor Geoff Lindeman, BSc(Med) MB BS(Hons) PhD FRACP FAHMS FAA

Geoff Lindeman, a clinician-scientist, is Joint Head of the Cancer Biology and Stem Cells Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (NHMRC Leadership Fellow) and a medical oncologist (breast cancer) at the Peter Ma­­cCallum Cancer Centre and Royal Melbourne Hospital. He holds an honorary appointment as Professorial Fellow in the Department of Medicine, Royal Melbourne Hospital, University of Melbourne. He leads the Centre for Translational Breast Cancer Research (TransBCR), enabled by a NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence grant.

His laboratory is studying molecular and cellular regulators of normal mammary gland development and events that go awry that lead to breast cancer. His team identified breast stem cells and has contributed influential discoveries into how stem cells and their descendants are regulated by female hormones and ‘master regulators’ of cell fate. The discovery of the culprit cell that gives rise to breast cancer in women with a faulty BRCA1 gene has led to an international breast cancer prevention study, BRCA-P, currently underway. His group has also generated patient derived xenograft (PDX) models that are being used in ‘proof-of-principle’ pre-clinical studies, to study promising drugs. Several of these have been further investigated in early phase clinical trials for patients with relapsed breast cancer.  He has been elected as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.