Brian Gabrielli

Professor Brian Gabrielli leads the Smiling for Smiddy Research Group at the Mater Research Institute, based at Brisbane’s Translational Research Institute. His main research interests involve examining the regulators of the cell cycle and studying how cancer may develop when something goes wrong with these control systems. In particular, Brian is interested in synthetic lethality, which searches for weaknesses unique to cancer cells capable of causing cell death when certain genes are knocked down. One of the tools that Brian uses to find these weaknesses is ARVEC, a high throughput automated cell culture facility which can screen thousands of genes in different cancer cell lines. Recently, Brian’s group has uncovered a gene which shows significant lethality in cancer cells positive for the human papillomavirus (HPV) and a drug capable of inhibiting the product of this gene shows considerable promise in treating HPV related cancers like cervical cancer.