Professor Kenneth O’Byrne
Prof Kenneth O’Byrne is a specialist Medical Oncologist. He is the founder of the British Thoracic Oncology Group (BTOG), and founder member of the European Thoracic Oncology Platform (ETOP), a member of the ESMO chest tumours faculty, is on the education and fellowship committees of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), and on the board of the Thoracic Alliance for Cancer Trials (TACT).
He is co-chair of the advanced lung cancer sub-committee of the Australian Lung cancer Trials Group (ALTG), and a member of the Medical Oncology Group of Australasia (MOGA), Australian Genomics Health Alliance (AGHA) and Queensland Genomics Health Alliance (QGHA).
Prof O’Byrne has been involved in more than 200 clinical trials in his career, including designing investigator-initiated, grant-funded Phase II and III studies. He has established collaborative studies and networks for biomarker detection and validation and has been involved in biomarker driven clinical trials including the LUX-Lung (Boehringer-Ingelheim), checkpoint immunotherapy (BMS, MSD) and the ETOP programs.
He is clinical lead for the ‘Cancer and Ageing Research Program’ at the Queensland University of Technology Translational Research Institute laboratories on the Princess Alexandra Hospital campus, his research including biomarker identification in solid and liquid biopsies, drug resistance linked to cancer ‘stemness’ and genomic instability. His collaborations are global with ongoing projects on drug resistance, DNA repair and genomic instability, and whole genome and exome sequencing linked to groups in Europe and the US.
He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has recently patented novel anti-cancer therapeutics and predictive biomarker tests in Australia and Ireland. He and his collaborators have successfully applied for grants from research, government and philanthropic sources including the NHMRC, Cancer Council Australia, Cancer Council Qld, Advance Queensland, Queensland Genomics Health Alliance, Prostate Cancer Foundation Australia and National Breast Cancer Foundation.
