Senior cancer researcher Associate Professor Kristen Radford is one of three of The University of Queensland‘s scientists heading ‘stateside’ with the support of 2020 Fulbright scholarships.
The Fulbright Program in Australia provides funding each year for the nation’s best and brightest to study at world-leading research institutes and universities in the United States.successful candidates. Dr Radford has spent more than a decade developing vaccines to treat a variety of cancer types, including one she is currently working on to target acute myeloid leukaemia, melanoma, prostate and ovarian cancer. “We have shown in novel preclinical human models that our new vaccine is superior to current vaccines that already show promise in clinical trials,” said Dr Radford, who will work at the Tisch Cancer Institute in New York. “They are world leaders in cancer vaccine clinical trials. My Fulbright scholarship will allow me to acquire new techniques and expertise, and develop new international partnerships to help translate our vaccine to the clinic.”
Radford is a Senior Research Fellow and NHMRC CDA Level 2 fellow, completing her PhD in 1997 from the University of Newcastle, NSW and awarded NSW Young Australian of the Year in 1998. She then undertook a postdoctoral position at Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London (now Cancer Research UK) developing new dendritic cell-based vaccine strategies for cancer immunotherapy. Radford joined Mater Research in 2001 and played a key role in obtaining the preclinical data that justified the first blood dendritic cell vaccine trial in prostate cancer that was completed in 2009. Her research interests are focused on understanding basic dendritic cell biology in humans and applying this knowledge to develop more potent cancer vaccines.
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