Dr Dannielle Upton

Dr Dannielle Upton is an early career research scientist. She is a cancer biologist with a research focus on paediatric brain tumours, working primarily on DIPG. She is a full time Senior Post-doctoral researcher at the Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI) and a conjoint lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Dannielle completed a Biomedical Science degree with Honours through the University of Technology Sydney in 2011. Her honours research project was undertaken at the Kolling Institute for Medical Research, in the Perinatal Research Laboratory, and focused on determining the role of Thromboxane receptor beta in preeclampsia. Following this she took on a research assistant position in 2012 at the ANZAC Research Institute in the Andrology Research Laboratory. She subsequently completed a PhD in the same laboratory, focused on examining the role of Follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) in ovarian reproductive health, function and aging. In 2016, during the last year of her PhD, she was selected as 1 of 20 students to attend the highly competitive and prestigious Frontiers in Reproductive Biology Program.

Once completing her PhD, she commenced a graduate research assistant position at the Brain and Mind Centre (BMC). Here she was responsible for the planning and execution of an ARC funded research project examining the effect of anaesthesia on brain biochemistry. She then commenced her first postdoctoral research position in 2018 at the Children’s Cancer Institute with the Brain Tumour Research Program. Her current project involves undertaking a variety of cellular, molecular biology and in vivo experiments to develop and improve treatments for Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas (DIPG). Her research focuses on understanding the cytotoxic effects of drugs identified from HTS and their effectiveness in patient derived animal models of DIPGs. She is also focusing on the development of novel therapeutic strategies such as combinations with irradiation and other chemotherapeutic agents with a particular emphasis on the translation of laboratory findings to clinical trials. She is also currently leading a Mark Hughes Foundation, DIPG collaborative and Accendatech funded project on a novel compound ACT001 and evaluating its efficacy in treating DIPG as a single agent and in combination. She is also leading a project investigating the repurposing of Auranofin as an anti-DIPG therapeutic funded through the Kid’s Cancer Project. She is also developing single cell RNA sequencing for analysis of DIPG samples and has a lead role in “Levi’s Project” which is examining the use of sequential therapies in the treatment of DIPG.