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Professor Bowtell is the Head of the Cancer Genomics and Genetics Program at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and PI for the Australian Ovarian Cancer Study (AOCS).

Professor Bowtell is one of Australia’s leading ovarian cancer and human molecular genetics researchers.

He was Director of Research at Peter Mac for the last decade, returning to fulltime research in 2010 to lead the ovarian cancer arm of the National Health and Medical Research Council’s (NHMRC) $27 million involvement in the International Cancer Genomics Consortium, a world-wide effort aimed at mapping all the significant mutations in common cancers.

 Professor Bowtell heads the Australian Ovarian Cancer Study, a nationally collaborative project involving over 2000 women with ovarian cancer and one of the largest cohort studies of ovarian cancer in the world.

He is a molecular biologist and his lab focuses on the genomic analysis of ovarian cancer, with a focus on primary and acquired drug resistance. His lab is also funded from Cancer Australia and the US DoD to investigate high-risk BRCA mutations in women with ovarian cancer.

Professor Robert Brown is Chair in Translational Oncology and Head of Division of Cancer within the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College, where he heads the Epigenetics Unit. His post is a joint appointment between Imperial College London and Institute of Cancer Research where he is the Epigenetics Team Leader in the Section of Molecular Pathology. Bob is Principal Investigator of a Cancer Research UK research programme, Drug Resistance and Epigenetic Mechanisms, and is a joint Principle Investigator of the Imperial Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre. He moved to London in 2007 after working for nearly 20 years at the CRUK Beatson Laboratories in Glasgow where he was Director of Laboratory Research in the Centre for Oncology and Applied Pharmacology. He obtained his BSc in Biological Sciences (Genetics) at Edinburgh University, his PhD at MRC Radiobiology Unit, Harwell, and his Post-doc at the German Cancer Research Centre, Heidelberg.

He has provided key insight into epigenetic mechanisms involved in tumorigenesis and resistance to chemotherapy, particularly in ovarian cancer. Recent areas of his research include; identifying novel epigenetic targets in ovarian and breast cancer, characterising histone marks and DNA methylation in breast and ovarian tumours as risk, prognostic and/or predictive biomarkers, and development of novel histone methyltransferase inhibitors.

He is Chair of the NCRI Biomarker and Imaging Clinical Studies Group whose remit is to facilitate and support biomarker and imaging studies in UK clinical trials. He is Deputy-Chair of CR-UK New Agents Committee and member of MRC Molecular and Cellular Medicine Board.

James D. Brenton is a senior group leader at the Cancer Research UK (CR-UK) Cambridge Institute and leads the Functional Genomics of Ovarian Cancer laboratory. He qualified in medicine from University College London in 1988 and trained in medical oncology at the Royal Marsden Hospital, Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto and the Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge. He has been an honorary consultant in medical oncology at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust since 2001. His PhD work was carried out at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute of Cancer and Developmental Biology and he held a Cancer Research UK Senior Clinical Research Fellow from 2001–2006 at the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre.

His research focuses on the identification of prognostic and predictive markers for therapy in ovarian cancer and identifying mechanisms of drug resistance, with particular emphasis on the genomic profiling of clinical samples and bioinformatic analysis.

He is the chair of the Informatics Advisory Group for the national CR-UK Stratified Medicine Programme and was previously Vice-Chair of the CR-UK Biomarkers and Imaging Discovery and Development Committee. He is a member of the international Ovarian Tumor Tissue Analysis (OTTA) Consortium project approval committee, the SGCTG Protocol Review Committee, NCRI ovarian cancer subgroup and the CR-UK Clinical Fellows Mentor Panel.