Dr Tina Bianco-Miotto
Position:
- Cancer Council SA W Bruce Hall Research Fellow, School of Paediatrics and Reproductive Health, The University of Adelaide/The Robinson Institute, The Robinson Institute
Websites:
Biography:
Dr Tina Bianco-Miotto is the W Bruce Hall Cancer Council of SA Research Fellow and is part of the Research Centre for Reproductive Health and Early Origins of Health and Disease, The Robinson Institute, School of Paediatrics and Reproductive Health, The University of Adelaide. Her most significant contributions have been to the field of epigenetics in cancer. Dr Bianco-Miotto has worked extensively with epigenetic mechanisms and methodologies and has contributed to the understanding of the role of DNA methylation in leukaemia, colon, breast, ovarian and prostate cancers. She has shown that epigenetic modifications can predict prostate cancer relapse and has shown the effectiveness of epigenetic therapies in treating prostate cancer cells. More recently, she has focused on how environmental factors, such as diet, may perturb epigenetic modifications which may result in an increased susceptibility to diseases later in life, including prostate cancer. Using a rat model, she has shown for the first time that exposure to a high fat diet in utero can alter the development of the prostate and is associated with increased prostate abnormalities in male offspring exposed to a high fat diet. She has also shown that critical epigenetic genes are altered in the prostates of adult rats exposed to a high fat diet in utero or prepuberty and that the prostate abnormalities and epigenetic gene expression changes are transmitted to second generation males through the father.
Best publications:
1. Chiam K, Ricciardelli C, Bianco-Miotto T. Epigenetic Biomarkers in Prostate Cancer: Current and Future Uses. Cancer Letters. 2012. epub ahead of print
2. Chiam K, Centenera MM, Butler LM, Tilley WD, Bianco-Miotto T. GSTP1 DNA methylation and expression status is indicative of 5-aza-2’-deoxycytidine efficacy in human prostate cancer cells. PLoS One. 2011. 6(9):e25634.
3. Bianco-Miotto T, Chiam K, Buchanan G, Jindal S, Day TK, Thomas M, Pickering MA, O’Loughlin M, Ryan NK, Raymond WA, Horvath LG, Kench JG, Stricker PD, Marshall VR, Sutherland RL, Henshall SM, Gerald WL, Scher HI, Risbridger GP, Clements JA, Butler LM, Tilley WD, Horsfall DJ, Ricciardelli C; for the Australian Prostate Cancer BioResource. Global levels of specific histone modifications and an epigenetic gene signature predict prostate cancer progression and development. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2010. 19(10):2611-22.
4. Ricciardelli C*, Bianco-Miotto T*, Jindal S, Dodd TJ, Cohen PA, Marshall VR, Sutherland PD, Samaratunga H, Kench J, Dong Y, Wang H, Clements JA, Risbridger GP, Sutherland RL, Tilley WD, Horsfall DJ; for the Australian Prostate Cancer BioResource. Comparative biomarker expression and RNA integrity in biospecimens derived from radical retropubic and robot assisted laparoscopic prostatectomies. (*Joint first authors). Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2010. 19(7):1755-65.
5. Chiam K, Tilley WD, Butler LM, Bianco-Miotto T. The dynamic and static modification of the epigenome by hormones: a role in the developmental origin of hormone related cancers. Biochim Biophys Acta - Reviews on Cancer. 2009. 1795: 104–109.
epigenetics, prostate cancer, obesity.
