Professor Bryan W. Day
(BSc Hons, PhD)
Professor Day is the Group Leader of the Sid Faithfull Brain Cancer Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer MRI and an internationally recognised expert in brain cancer. He is Co-Director of the Children’s Brain Cancer Centre, a national initiative to improve outcomes for children with brain cancer. The focus of his laboratory's research is to better understand the molecular mechanisms which drive the most common and aggressive forms of both adult and paediatric brain cancers. Among Prof Day’s achievements is the characterisation of the receptor EphA3 as a therapeutic target in GBM. This research has led to clinical testing of a novel EphA3 targeting therapeutic antibody in patients with recurrent brain cancer.
A major achievement has been the development a brain tumour and cell culture bank at QIMR Berghofer which has collected >450 tumour specimens to-date. From this resource >60 primary cell lines have been generated which are the basis of his group's research and collaborative researchers around the world.
Twelve of these models have been characterised in great detail and made publicly available as a resource termed QCell. QCell models have been used in numerous studies globally and have been published in >50 articles to-date.
Prof Day is a past ASMR Director and is the Deputy Chair of the scientific advisory committee for the Co-Operative Trials Group for Neuro-Oncology (COGNO) and the steering committee for Brain Cancer Biobanking Australian (BCBA) as such he is well placed to translate his findings to clinical trial.
Current Projects & Areas of Interest:
Defining novel therapies for the treatment of brain cancer
Defining Eph receptors as therapeutic targets in brain cancer.
Exploring the use of Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs) in the treatment of brain cancer.
Establishing a Glioblastoma Organoid (GBO) culture protocol in combination with single-cell RNA sequencing to study the gene expression in individual cancer cells.
Preclinical research to address the disease obstacles preventing meaningful research advances
Understanding intratumoural heterogeneity and interclonal cooperativity in brain cancer.
Developing effective strategies to target multiple GBM cell-states.
Brain cancer tissue and culture bank development
Ongoing development and distribution of QCell models to both academic and commercial collaborators
Characterisation of QCell recurrent models
Development of paediatric brain cancer tissue and culture bank