Proteome and cancer research

Richard Christopherson has pretty much always worked in cancer research. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne, before heading to Los Angeles on a fellowship from the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Cancer Fund held at the University of Southern California Medical School.

After two years, he moved with Dr Mary Ellen Jones to the Department of Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina Medical School in Chapel Hill, where she became head of department and he took up a special fellowship of the Leukemia Society of America.

Christopherson returned to Australia as a research fellow in the John Curtin School of Medical Research and was then appointed as the CR Roper Fellow in Medical Research at the University of Melbourne where he started his own research laboratory. He has now worked at the University of Sydney for 21 years, where he was the foundation chair of the School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences from 1998-2003 and now holds a personal chair.

Christopherson has held a long-term interest in the cytotoxic mechanisms of anticancer drugs. In the early 1990s, his group elucidated the antipurine mechanism for methotrexate, an antifolate drug used to treat a variety of cancers and autoimmune diseases. This was a significant discovery that went against the model at the time developed by the US National Cancer Institute, paving the way for widespread use of methotrexate at different dosages.

In 2003, Christopherson and his school received a grant of $1.8 million to establish the Sydney University Proteome Research Unit, of which he is director.