Scientific Advisers

Professor Margaret Frame is a Science Director at Cancer Research UK (Edinburgh Centre) and the Chair of Cancer Biology at the University of Edinburgh. She has spent years working on a specialised molecular network that’s responsible for controlling how cells stick to one another, move and spread. She’s found that a key molecule in this so-called ‘adhesion network’, called FAK, can affect the environment around tumours and help the cancer cells escape attack by the immune system.

Paul completed his PhD at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, UK in 2002 before moving to the Garvan Institute in 2003 to investigate growth factor receptor trafficking in breast cancer and head and neck cancers. Today, Paul heads the Invasion and Metastasis lab which has an ongoing interest in the development of novel multi-disciplinary live imaging techniques to investigate molecular dynamics of cancer cells in vivo and using these techniques to understand cancer in the context of the surrounding environment. Pinpointing the molecular drivers of cancer progression and the environmental cues that cause resistance to current therapies are the focus of his group’s research.

Mark is the Chief Executive Officer at Aculeus Therapeutics and the former Chief Scientific Officer at Amplia Therapeutics. He was the Biology Leader of the CRC for Cancer Therapeutics (CTx) program that discovered AMP945 and AMP886. After obtaining a PhD in Pharmacology from the University of Melbourne, Mark has worked in a variety of roles focused on drug discovery and development in several therapeutic areas including, pain, inflammation, autoimmune disease and oncology. Mark worked at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre between 2008 and 2018 in various roles for CTx), first as Head of the Translational Cancer Biology Laboratory and later as Director of Translational Cancer Biology. In his role as a lead scientist, Mark and his team were involved in the PRMT5 program that was licensed by CTx to MSD, in 2016 and the Chromatin-Modifying Enzyme programs licensed to Pfizer Inc in 2018.