Associate Professor Christine Chaffer

Christine leads the Cancer Cell Plasticity Lab at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. Her research focuses on cancer cell plasticity – the ability of cancer cells to change their physiological characteristics. This feature allows cancer cells to create and spread tumours around the body, to resist therapies and to recur post-treatment. Christine’s goal is to anticipate and intercept cancer evolution by understanding how tumour cells adapt at the single-cell level, and transform this knowledge into therapies that block recurrence and move us closer to curing metastatic disease.

Associate Professor Chaffer’s work also aims to provide translational therapeutic benefits. She has challenged, and changed, pre‐established paradigms in cancer biology, demonstrating the effects of cancer cell plasticity on driving tumour progression and development into metastatic disease. Christine combines technologies including single-cell transcriptomics, CRISPR functional genomics, organoid and patient-derived models, and live-cell imaging with new machine learning tools to reveal mechanisms that underlie relapse and therapeutic resistance.

Christine is deeply committed to translating her findings into clinical impact. Her work has directly informed and provided the groundwork for clinical trials, including the 4CAST trial for triple negative breast cancer, which tests a new combination therapy to target a ‘defence switch’ on cancer cells that alerts cancer to the threat of chemotherapy. As Principal Investigator of the inaugural National Breast Cancer Foundation $25 million Clinical Research Accelerator (CRA) – the AllClear program – she leads an international consortium to translate her research on cancer dormancy and plasticity into investigator-initiated clinical trials designed to prevent recurrence in breast cancer.