Heather Thorne
KCONFAB NATIONAL MANAGER
Oncology
The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
Australia
Biography
With a background in laboratory research in the molecular genetics of breast cancer, Heather was appointed in 1997 as the first national manager of kConFab, the Australasian research consortium for families at high risk of breast, ovarian and prostate cancer. An important milestone to date has been the listing of kConFab as an author in 290 high ranking international journals and publications and the facilitation of 150 research projects, many active for 10 + years. She has a particularly interested in expanding upon a biobanks/cohort translational role by supplying participants, their families and their treating family cancer clinics with clinically significant BRCA, p53, PALB2 and ATM mutation test results and assisting to recruiting eligible participants to new targeted therapies based on their genetic testing profile of either germ-line or somatic mutations. An expansion of this work was the establishment and direct involvement in the rapid autopsy program known as CASCADE in 2012 that involves kConFab (breast, ovarian and prostate cancer patients), AOCS and the Melanoma research groups at PeterMac.
Research Interest
Breast, ovarian and prostate cancer
Publications
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Risbridger GP, Taylor RA, Clouston D, Sliwinski A, Thorne H, Hunter S, Li J, Mitchell G, Murphy D, Frydenberg M, Pook D, Pedersen J, Toivanen R, Wang H, Papargiris M, Lawrence MG, Bolton DM (2014). Patient-derived Xenografts Reveal that Intraductal Carcinoma of the Prostate Is a Prominent Pathology in BRCA2 Mutation Carriers with Prostate Cancer and Correlates with Poor Prognosis. Eur Urol.67(3):496-503.
