Professor Peter Croucher

Prof Peter Croucher is the Director of the Cancer Plasticity and Dormancy Program and Head of the Bone Biology laboratory at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research.

His postdoctoral training was at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sheffield. He relocated to the University of Oxford’s Institute of Musculoskeletal Sciences as a Senior Research Fellow in 2001, returning to the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Sheffield in 2003 as Professor of Bone Biology. In 2009 he formed and led the new Department of Human Metabolism, and became the inaugural co-Director of the Mellanby Centre for Bone Research.

In 2011, Prof Croucher moved to Garvan to lead its Division of Bone Biology and to take up the inaugural Mrs Janice Gibson & the Ernest Heine Family Foundation Chair in Osteoporosis.

Prof Croucher is a leading international authority in cancer cell dormancy, mechanisms of cancer-associated bone disease and bone biology, publishing >180 peer-reviewed publications. He has made major contributions that have seen bone-targeted therapies adopted in clinical practice globally, including zoledronic acid and anti-RANKL therapies. His esteem is evidenced by his leadership of international research consortia, including ProMis (PROstate Cancer MetastasIS co-funded by Movember and the Prostate Cancer Foundation) and the Wellcome Trust-funded Origins of Bone & Cartilage Disease program. From 2011-2016 he was Chair of the Cancer and Bone Society, the peak international body. Subsequently, from 2017-2019 he was President of the Australian and New Zealand Bone and Mineral Society, the premier Australasian society in bone and mineral metabolism.

By transforming the understanding of cancer cell dormancy in bone, Prof Croucher’s research program has been critical to recent global recognition of the role of dormant cancer cells in relapse and metastasis. In collaboration with Prof Tri Phan, he invented intravital imaging methods to track and follow the fate of individual dormant cells in the skeleton and pioneered scRNASeq to uncover a unique and clinically relevant ‘dormancy signature’ and new molecular control pathways. Together they introduced the concept of extrinsic control of cancer cell dormancy by bone cells and discovered a new cell, the osteomorph, which may control dormant cell reactivation. More recently, they discovered tissue-specific control mechanisms that are common to all cancers in bone, paving a way for universal treatments.