Andrew Boyd

Biography

 Professor Boyd is the Leukaemia Foundation Professor of Experimental Haematology at the University of Queensland, and a Senior Professorial Research Fellow of the QIMR. He has been a member of the Leukaemia Foundation’s National Medical and Scientific Advisory Committee since 2005 and has been the Chair of the Leukaemia Foundation Grant Review Committee since its inception in 2003. Professor Boyd began his research career in 1978 carrying out PhD studies on B cell lymphoma with Professors Gus Nossal and John Schrader at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute. He went on to post doctoral positions with Professor Don Metcalf and later with Professor Lee Nadler at the Dana Farber Institute in Boston where he worked on human leukaemia and lymphoma. He returned to the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in 1985 to establish a laboratory whose main focus was the biochemistry and molecular biology of membrane proteins, with a particular emphasis on their role in leukaemia and other cancers. In 1992 his lab described human EphA3, a unique protein in a human pre B cell leukaemia. Since then studies of the Eph family of proteins and of their ligands, the ephrins family, have been the major research focus of his group. In 1996 he moved to Brisbane to take up the Leukaemia Foundation Chair of Experimental Haematology and has continued his research program (Eph, ICAM-1, VCAM-1, cadherins, integrins, Fat1 protocadherin). Recently the lab has been increasingly engaged in translational research aiming at trials in humans of antibody and receptor antagonists. In the course of these studies he has published over 180 research papers in leading medical research journals. His work has generated 12 patents and he is now working with two international biotech companies to develop novel potential therapies.

Research Interest

 Professor Boyd also serves as Assistant Director of QIMR with a specific role in clinical and translational research and continues clinical activities as a Consultant Clinical Haematologist at the Royal Brisbane Hospital.