WEHI Postgraduate Seminar Series hosted by the Education Committee

Associate Professor James Whittle
Co-lead, Brain Cancer Research Laboratory
Personalised Oncology Division, WEHI 
Medical Oncologist, Neuro Oncology Lead
Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre 
Joint-head Research Strategy, Brain Cancer Centre 

The Perioperative Platform as a Catalyst for Innovation in Translational Research
 

Davis Auditorium

Join via TEAMS

Including Q&A session

Jim Whittle is an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and clinician-scientist specialising in neuro-oncology. He is Neuro-Oncology Lead at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Co-Director of Research Strategy at the Brain Cancer Centre in Melbourne. Together with Dr Best and Dr Freytag he co-leads the Brain Cancer Research Laboratory (BCRL) in the Personalised Oncology Division. 

The BCRL portfolio spans discovery science, translational biology, and early-phase clinical trials, with the aim of improving treatment options for people with brain cancer. The laboratory integrates precision oncology, patient-derived tumour models, spatial multi-omics, and perioperative clinical trials to better understand tumour biology and translate laboratory discoveries into clinical studies in brain cancer.

Jim also leads the Brain Perioperative Program (BPOP), a Victorian Government–funded initiative developing an integrated perioperative research platform in glioma. In this seminar, he will explore how perioperative clinical trials are emerging as a powerful platform for translational discovery. Using brain cancer as a central example, he will highlight how the perioperative window enables direct study of treatment effects in human tissue, accelerating understanding of disease biology and therapeutic response. He will discuss recent work from the BCRL (Drummond et al., Nature Medicine, 2025), alongside examples from other rare diseases to illustrate the broader applicability of this approach. The seminar will also consider the critical role of multidisciplinary collaboration in driving meaningful advances in translational research.

All welcome!