Dr Kieran Scott
Position:
- Associate Professor of Oncology , School of Medicine, University of Western Sydney
Biography:
Dr Scott trained in Chemistry and Biochemistry at Massey University, New Zealand before completing his PhD in Genetics at the Research School of Biological Sciences, ANU in the early eighties. There he cloned the bacterial genes encoding nitrogenase, the enzyme that makes atmospheric nitrogen available to living organisms.
Following several years at ANU, using reversed genetics techniques that were the forerunners of “knockout mouse” technology to clone and characterise bacterial genes involved in bacterial-plant interactions, he joined a Sydney start-up biotechnology company “PacBio” where his interest in the pathways of arachidonic acid metabolism as targets for new drug development began.
In the early nineties, he established the Inflammation Research Laboratory in the St Vincent’s Hospital Clinical School, UNSW, which became the founding laboratory of the Arthritis and Inflammation Research Programme of the Garvan Institute, Sydney.
Dr Scott’s research interests in phospholipase A2 enzymes as targets for new drug development have led him to study their role in clinical disorders ranging from sepsis and septic shock to asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, atherosclerosis, reperfusion injury and more recently cancer. His work has led to a promising new therapeutic approach to the treatment of prostate cancer that is approaching the clinic.
phospholipase A2 enzymes.
