David Thomas

Current role

Director of the Centre for Molecular Oncology at the University of New South Wales; National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow;  Chief Executive Officer of Omico;  Head of the Genomic Cancer Medicine Laboratory at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research.  

Expertise

Prof Thomas founded the Australasian Sarcoma Study Group, which has enrolled over 1,000 patients onto research studies since 2008, and provided over $1.1M of funding through 18 grants to young researchers. He founded and leads the International Sarcoma Kindred Study, the largest ever conducted study of genetic factors in sarcoma, now recruiting from 23 centres in the US, UK, France, India, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia. He led the first international study of denosumab in Giant Cell Tumor of bone, leading to FDA, EMA and TGA approval of this agent for the management of this disorder. He also co-led a meta-analysis of whole body MRI screening for patients with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, changing clinical practice guidelines from the NCCN, AACR and EviQ in Australia. He was the lead applicant for the recent listing on the MBS of WBMRI for this indication. He is the CEO of Omico, a Federally-funded national precision oncology platform which focuses on using genomics to develop biomarker-dependent clinical trials infrastructure, and genetically stratified risk management. Omico has enabled more than 8,000 Australians with advanced cancer to access genomic profiling, and matched targeted therapies and has recently launched PrOSPeCT which will see >20,000 Australian patients with advanced cancer have access to tumour molecular profiling and targeted therapies. He has published over 230 papers, including first or last author papers in Science, Cancer Cell, Molecular Cell, JAMA Oncology, Lancet Oncology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer Discovery, Journal of Clinical Investigation and Nature Communications. His work has been cited more than 10,000 times, with an H-index of 58 (Web of Science).