Pharmacogenomics - Senior Research Staff - Dr Mark Waltham

Dr Mark Waltham

Unit Head

Education and Professional Experience

1984    BSc(Hons), University of Queensland
1990    PhD, University of Queensland

Achievements

1998-01   C.R. Roper Fellowship, University of Melbourne, St Vincent's Campus
1995-98   Fogarty Visiting Fellow, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda
1997        Equal Opportunity Education Prog Award, Dept. Health & Human Services, NIH
1990-94   Post-Doctoral Scholar, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York

Research Interests

It is with some certainty that over the next 20 years we will see huge advances in the area of personalized therapies for disease. This will come about due to the improved ability to detect and interpret specific molecular attributes of an individuals' disease condition. Along these lines, Dr Waltham's main area of interest is pharmacogenomics, a discipline which incorporates bioinformatic approaches to the cataloguing and processing of information relating to pharmacology and genetics. It is applied to identify drug targets, examining the 'molecular patterns' found in patients' samples, and to the study of how genes affect a person's response to drugs. His laboratories principle disease interests are cancer and diabetes.

Selected Publications

  1. Waltham, M., Cornell, B. and Smith, R. Association of ferri- and ferro- cytochrome c with lipid multilayers: A phosphours 31 solid-state NMR study. Biochem. Biophys. Acta. (1986) 862: 451-456.
  2. Goker, E., Waltham, M., Kheradpour, A., Trippett T., Mazumdar M., Elisseyeff Y., Schnieders B., Steinherz P., Tan C., Berman E., and Bertino JR. Amplification of the dihydrofolate reductase gene is a mechanism of acquired resistance to methotrexate in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and is correlated with p53 gene mutations. Blood (1995) 86: 677-684.
  3. Waltham*, M., Ercikan-Abali*, E.A., Dicker, A.P., Schweitzer, B.I., Gritsman, H., Banerjee, D. and Bertino, J.R. Variants of human dihydrofolate reductase with substitutions at leucine-22: Effect on catalytic and inhibitor binding properties Molecular Pharmacology (1996) 49: 430-437.
  4. Gorlick, R., Goker, E., Trippett, T., Waltham, M., Banerjee, D. and Bertino, J.R. Mechanisms of intrinsic and acquired resistance to methotrexate in acute leukemia. New Eng. J. Med. (1996) 335: 1041-1048.
  5. Waltham, M., Li, W-W., Gritsman, H., Tong, W.P. and Bertino, J.R. g-Glutamyl hydrolase from human sarcoma 1080 cells: Characterization and inhibition by glutamine antagonists. Molecular Pharmacology (1997) 51: 825-832.
  6. Weinstein, J.N., Waltham, M., Reinhold, W., Lee, J.K., Smith, L.H., Andrews, D., Tanabe, L., Zhou, Y., Myers, T.G., Buolamwini, J.K., and Scherf, U. The current revolution in cancer drug discovery: Genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics. pg 21-36 in Fighting against Cancer: Progress and New Hopes, 2000.
  7. Scherf, U., Ross, D.T., Waltham, M., Smith, L.H., Lee, J.L., Kohn, K.W.,Myers, T.G., Eisen, M.B., Reinhold, W.C., Andrews, D.T., Scudiero, D.A., Pommier, Y., Botstein, D., Brown, P.O. and Weinstein, J.N. A cDNA microarray gene expression database for the molecular pharmacology of cancer: gene-drug correlations. Nature Genetics (2000) 24(3): 227-234.
  8. Ross, D.T, Scherf, U., Eisen, M.B., Perou, C.M., Spellman, P., Iyer, V., Jeffrey, S.S., Van de Rijn, M., Waltham, M., Pergamenschikov, A., Lee, J.C.F., Lashkari, D., Shalon, D., Myers, T.G., Weinstein, J.N., Botstein, D. and Brown, P.O. Exploring the phenotypes encoded in the gene expression patterns in sixty tumor derived cell lines. Nature Genetics (2000) 24(3): 236-244.
  9. Nishizuka, S., Charboneau, L., Young, L., Major, S., Reinhold, W.C., Waltham, M., Kouros-Mehr, H., Bussey, K.J., Lee, J.K., Munson, P.J., Petricoin, E., I, Liotta, L.A., and J. N. Weinstein. Proteomic profiling of the NCI60 cancer cell lines using new high-density 'reverse-phase' lysate microarrays. P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, (2003) Vol. 100 (24): 14229-14234.
  10. Tester, A. M., Waltham, M., Oh, S-J., Bae, S-N., Bills, M.M., Walker, E.C., Kern, F.G., Stetler-Stevenson, W-G., Lippman, M.E. and E. W. Thompson. Pro-matrix metalloproteinase-2 transfection increases orthotopic primary growth and experimental metastasis of MDA-MB-231 human breast cancer cells in nude mice. Cancer Research, (2004) Vol. 64 (2), 652-658.
  11. Kamarinos, M. and M. Waltham, Microarrays in medical research. Australian Biochemist, (2004), Vol. 35(2): 36-39.
  12. Kamarinos, M., Blick, T., Kelly, D., Gow, R., Gilbert, R.E. and M. Waltham. Microarray profiling gene expression changes associated with diabetic nephropathy. (2005) Am. J. Physiol. In Press.