Professor Tony Papenfuss

Professor Tony Papenfuss

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Tony Papenfuss

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Professor
Tony
Papenfuss

BSc (Hons) Monash PhD Monash

Laboratory Head; Leader, Computational Biology Theme

Division:

My research spans computational cancer biology and bioinformatics methods development. My team develops novel mathematical, statistical and computational methods and applies these to make sense of cancer "omics" data. We particularly focus on rare cancers, melanoma, prostate cancer and myeloma, but also work on some other diseases.

Research interest

A major focus of our work is cancer heterogeneity and evolution—how the genomes and transcriptomes of tumours and their microenvironments change as they are initiated and progress. This is critical in understanding how tumours metastasise and develop resistance to therapies.

We are also interested in complex genomic rearrangements and the mechanisms underlying extreme amplification events in genomes. We have developed novel methods to identify these rearrangements and use mathematical models to make sense of them. With this approach, we recently discovered the dynamic mechanisms underlying the formation of giant cancer-associated neochromosomes.