Barbara Fazekas De St Groth

Biography

Professor Fazekas de St Groth began her academic life as a maths and physics undergraduate at the ANU. She went on to complete her BSc(Med) MBBS at theUniversity of Sydney and worked as a Professorial Intern and Resident at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney before completing a PhD in the area of T lymphocyte biology with JFAP Miller at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne. Subsequently she undertook postdoctoral training with Mark Davis at Stanford University where she developed the first T cell receptor transgenic mouse model for the analysis of CD4 T cell responses in vivo and published landmark papers describing thymic positive and negative selection of CD4 T cells. She returned to Sydney on a CJ Martin Fellowship and became a founding member of the Centenary Institute, setting up the T cell biology lab where she established an international reputation for her work using T cell receptor transgenic mouse models and multiparameter flow cytometry to define fundamental immune processes, including those involved in allergy, autoimmunity and cancer. Her studies on the role of regulatory T cells in mice and humans included the discovery of the gold-standard phenotyping strategy that allows pure populations of human regulatory T cells to be isolated and manipulated for immunotherapy. In 2016, she was appointed a Professor in the Discipline of Pathology at the University of Sydney, where she is the Director of the Ramaciotti Facility for Human Systems Biology. The Ramaciotti Facility commissioned the first CyTOF II mass cytometry platform in Australia, a breakthrough technology that greatly speeds up the pace of cytometry-based protein measurement at the single cell level. Since 2016, the Ramaciotti Facility has upgraded to the Helios platform and installed the first Hyperion mass imaging platform in the Southern Hemisphere. Professor Fazekas de St Groth’s current research involves the use of highly multi-parametric mass cytometry to define immune signatures that predict individual patient disease profiles and responses to cancer immunotherapy.

Research Interest

“My work involves understanding how basic immune functions contribute to a range of human conditions in the areas of transplantation, cancer, allergy and autoimmunity. I am currently developing mass cytometry technology to identify immune signatures that predict individual patient disease profiles and responses to therapy. One hope is that this will enable me to develop a blood test that will predict cancer patient response to checkpoint therapy, thus saving considerable expense and suffering from wasted therapies. “My 5 year aims are to develop new insights into immune regulation in clinical and preclincal settings, and to help the University of Sydney to bring immune signature analysis into the clinic as a novel decision-making tool in rheumatology, cancer immunotherapy and renal transplantation. I will build up the team within the Ramaciotti Facility, strengthening collaborations within the University and nationally, forging international links in mass cytometry, bioinformatics and systems biology, and developing further commercial links in clinical trial monitoring.”