Cancer researcher named as Young Bioscientist of the Year

Cancer researcher named as Young Bioscientist of the Year
Media Release - University of Auckland
20 September 2016

World class oncology researcher, Dr Francis Hunter, from the University of Auckland, was named “Young Bioscientist of the Year” at the NZBIO Excellence Awards Dinner in Auckland last week.

The selection was by the bio-enterprise organisation, NZBIO, for individual excellence and achievement in bio-based business and research.

Dr Hunter is a research fellow at the University’s Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre, where he uses cutting-edge genetic technologies to understanding molecular mechanisms of drug and radiation responses in cancer - allowing treatments to become more precise and personalised. He holds the John Gavin Fellowship from the Genesis Oncology Trust.

Dr Hunter has won a series of domestic and international awards for his work, which includes academic and industry partnerships with collaborators in Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States.

In 2014, he was a member of a team that won the international Breast Cancer Startup Challenge. Last year, he was successful among 850 candidates in the Merck Serono Innovation Cup and is now a pharmaceutical consultant to Germany-based Merck KGaA.

Founding Director of the University’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Geoff Whitcher says, “Francis, through his formal biomedical education along with his extra-curricular activities in Spark (now Velocity) and other international competitions, epitomises the type of person that New Zealand requires to make the transition to a knowledge-based economy.”

“He is outstanding in his area of technical speciality (oncology) and he is innovative, entrepreneurial, business savvy and globally connected. Francis is a wonderful role model for others not only at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences but throughout the University.”

Dr Hunter was recently the first New Zealander to be appointed to the Associate Member Council of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The AACR is the largest organisation for cancer research in the world, with a global membership of 37,000 clinicians and scientists.

He says that while the longstanding struggle to find effective treatments for cancer has been compared to the initiative to land astronauts on the moon in the 1960s, the key difference is that cancer is a vastly more complex challenge.

Dr Hunter has raised $600,000 to research cancer therapies as the principal scientist and contributes to research awarded $2.2 million in additional funding.

In Auckland, he is working on several major oncology projects, including with Professor Bill Wilson on a three-year, $800,000 Marsden Fund project looking at new approaches to the treatment of drug resistant and relapsed leukaemia.

ENDS

Notes

• Dr Francis Hunter (now aged 31), graduated from the University of Auckland with a BSc and Honours in Biomedical Science. He completed his PhD at the University of Auckland in December 2014 and officially graduated in May 2015. He gained a place on the Dean’s List for the excellence of his doctoral research.

• His research focuses on the use of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology to understand genetic mechanisms of sensitivity and resistance to treatment in cancer.

• He has won research fellowships and prizes from the Genesis Oncology Trust, Cancer Society, School of Medicine Foundation, Sir John Logan Campbell Medical Trust, University of Auckland and Auckland Medical Research Foundation.

• He has already participated successfully as a winner (from more than 680 entries, in 2014) in the global Breast Cancer Startup Challenge (run by the Avon Foundation, Centre for Advancing Innovation, and National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute).

• He was also a member of the international winning team in the Merck Serono Innovation Cup in April (run in Darmstadt in Germany) where he was selected as one of 30 finalists, from a pool of 850 entries. His proposal was chosen as the overall winning concept for the Merck Serono Innovation Cup, sharing the €20,000 prize and trophy among the winning team. Merck Serono is now implementing the proposed project, which involves technology developed at the University of Auckland.

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