DR DAN WORTHLEY

Dr Dan Worthley is a Beat Cancer Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide and SAHMRI. He studied medicine at the University of Adelaide (graduated 2000), then trained in medicine and gastroenterology at the RAH and Flinders medical Centre (2000-2006). After his clinical training, Dan moved to Brisbane, where he completed a PhD and a Masters of Public Health at the University of Queensland (2007-2010). After his PhD, he moved to New York to begin a 4-year post-doctoral fellowship as a CJ Martin, RG Menzies and Ines Mandl fellow at Columbia University studying the biology of connective tissues in cancer (2010-2014). This resulted in a first author paper published in Cell in January 2015. This article described a novel skeletal stem cell that is particularly important in bone healing and bone development and also identified a new connective tissue stem cell in the bowel. This work has helped to redefine mesenchymal hierarchy within the skeleton and the intestine. Dan recently started his laboratory at SAHMRI and the University of Adelaide, funded by a Beat Cancer Fellowship, and more recently an NHMRC Project Grant. Dan’s “Gastrointestinal cancer biology group” at SAHMRI is working to therapeutically modify connective tissues in the setting of cancer and tissue injury. Dan’s team uses a variety of transgenic mouse models and new translational human approaches in order to bring basic scientific discoveries into the clinic.