The
Drugs Don’t Work: a new
therapeutic target for cancer
Marie Ranson
An overall aim of Marie Ranson’s
research is to use biological knowledge of how cancers progress to devise a new
generation of cancer therapeutics. Knowing that it is the capacity of cancer
cells to metastasise that is lethal, she investigates one of the critical
processes in cancer cells metastasis - the breakdown of tissue barriers by
cancer cells. Dr Ranson and her group have been working on a particular protein
involved in this process, known as uPA. The uPA system is used by human breast
(and other) cancer cells when they are most malignant, to allow them to spread
throughout the body and form secondary tumours. Dr Ranson’s research program has
shown that malignant cancer cells over-express uPA, and that this is linked to
an increased ability of cells to metastasise. Dr Ranson’s most recent work is
testing the idea of using a highly effective cell-killing agent targeted to uPA
to directly and selectively kill cancer cells.
Dr Ranson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong. Since attaining a permanent academic position in 1999 at the University of Wollongong, Marie has established a
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| Marie's Research Group |
research program that encompasses various research disciplines (cancer biology, synthetic chemistry, nuclear medicine through to clinical expertise). Marie’s driving career objective is to set up a local, internationally recognised integrated cancer research program aimed at the identification and rapid assessment of potential new targets and targeted therapy strategies. In addition, she intends to further develop her basic science research directed towards elucidating the process of tumour progression to malignancy. In July 2005, she was awarded a Cancer Institute NSW Career Development Fellowship that will allow her to coordinate, manage and further develop her research program over the next three years.
Marie is married with two boys aged 10 and 11. She and her husband love to travel and an extended holiday after
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Confocal microscopy helps to visualise targets on cells |
her PhD lead to her first post-doctoral position at the National Institutes of Health near Washington DC. More recently, the whole family spent six months in Germany, with Marie on sabbatical at the GBF Biotechnology Research Institute in Braunschweig. With the support of her husband and family and the flexible work hours and study leave provisions of her job, Marie has managed to make an outstanding contribution in her research field while bringing up two children. “I am proud to have been part of the University’s impressive growth and increasing profile as a prominent research University.”
