Associate Professor Marina Pajic completed her PhD (2008) at the University of New South Wales, where she began to develop strong research interests into improving our understanding behind mechanisms of treatment-induced resistance. During her post doc in the renowned group of Prof Piet Borst (Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam), she established mouse models to study mechanisms of chemoresistance in breast cancer (PNAS 2007), characterising key therapeutic targets (Cancer Research 2009, Clinical Cancer Research 2017).

In 2010, Dr Pajic moved back to Australia to join the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative (APGI), at the Garvan Institute. During this time, Dr Pajic developed substantial novel infrastructure of patient-derived models of pancreatic cancer, and unique personalised medicine projects for pancreatic cancer. She has independently run her group since 2013 as Group Leader, having been promoted to Garvan Faculty in 2018. She has made major advances in our understanding of tumour progression and metastasis, including world’s first functional validation of tailored therapies for pancreatic cancer (Gut 2018, Science Translational Medicine 2017), delineating complex resistance mechanisms (Cancer Research 2018, Clinical Cancer Research 2017), and high-tier collaborative papers in cancer genomics and clinical research (Nature x7, Nature Communications, J Clin Oncology), and authoritative reviews for leading journals (Gastroenterology 2018). Prestigious awards for her research include the 2017 NSW Premier’s Outstanding Cancer Research Fellow Award and the 2018 Lorne Genome Young Investigator Award.

She is the current NHMRC Career Development Fellow and CINSW Career Development Fellow, with project funding from the NHMRC, Cancer Australia, CCNSW and CINSW supporting her research.