Andrew Spencer

Professor Andrew Spencer is Head of the Malignant Haematology and Stem Cell Transplantation Service at The Alfred Hospital, Professor of Haematology at Monash University, Head of the Myeloma Research Group and Co-Director of the ACRF Blood Cancer Therapeutics Centre at the Australian Centre for Blood Diseases, all in Melbourne, Australia.

Prof Spencer completed his medical training in clinical and laboratory haematology in Brisbane and Sydney in 1992. He then was awarded a LRF (UK) Fellowship and spent 3 years at The Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London, United Kingdom where he undertook research into B-cell clonality in chronic myeloid leukemia and was awarded a Doctorate in Medicine from the University of London. Subsequently he moved to The Alfred Hospital where he established an independent translational research program. He was appointed Head of Malignant Hematology and Stem Cell Transplantation Services in 2007 and established a first-in-human and early phase hematology clinical research unit at the hospital in 2009.

Prof Spencer has 185 peer reviewed publications with citations in excess of 12,600 and holds 4 international patents in multiple myeloma (MM) therapeutics. Since 2013 he has been an invited speaker at 40 international meetings on genomics, therapeutics and disease monitoring in MM and is an invited investigator of the International Myeloma Foundation (IMF) Black Swan Research Initiative devising and implementing global minimal residual disease strategies for MM. He serves on the scientific advisory boards of the IMF and the International Myeloma Working Group. He chairs the Myeloma and Related Diseases Registry that he established in 2012 and the Australasian Myeloma Research Consortium. He sits on the steering committee for the global MM registry initiative INSIGHT.

The research program of Professor Andrew Spencer aims to:

(1) identify more effective and rationale novel therapeutic strategies for MM through the identification of drug resistance processes and/or biomarkers of drug responsiveness (employing transcriptional and proteomic studies in mouse models and primary tumours) with rapid translational of synergistic drug combinations into early phase investigator-initiated clinical trials, and

(2) identify mechanisms of MM disease progression, with a particular focus on the role of the cell surface phosphatase CD45, and

(3) explore the role of different modalities of minimal residual disease (MRD) detection in MM to optimise their utility in clinical practice.