Rate My Professor Antony Braithwaite

Professor Antony Braithwaite is a Research Professor and Laboratory Head in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Otago's Dunedin School of Medicine, within the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Division. He holds a personal Professorship in Pathology, appointed in 1996. Braithwaite also serves as Head of the Cell Transformation Unit at the Children’s Medical Research Institute, based at the University of Sydney, where he splits his time between the two institutions. His laboratory at Otago, the Braithwaite Laboratory: Cell Transformation, co-led with Professor Margaret Baird, investigates fundamental processes in cancer formation. He is recognized as an expert in the molecular mechanisms of cancer and is a Principal Investigator at the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery. Additionally, he contributes to the Otago Zebrafish Facility.

Braithwaite completed his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees at the University of Auckland, followed by a PhD at the Australian National University. He was awarded a Howard Florey Fellowship and conducted research at the Marie Curie Cancer Research Institute in the United Kingdom before leading a team studying cancer cell formation mechanisms at the Australian National University. His research centers on the regulation of cell proliferation and survival, with a primary focus on the tumour suppressor protein p53, including its mutant and isoform variants such as Δ133p53 that promote cancer progression. The laboratory examines the pro-cancer protein YB-1, which binds and inhibits p53 activity, identifying it as a potential therapeutic target. Research employs cell culture models, transgenic mice expressing specific p53 variants, bioinformatics analysis of human tumour datasets, and zebrafish models. Notable publications include 'Δ133p53β isoform pro-invasive activity is regulated through an aggregation-dependent mechanism in cancer cells' in Nature Communications (2021), 'Cohesin mutations are synthetic lethal with stimulation of WNT signalling' in eLife (2020), and contributions to studies on TP53 splicing and YBX1 expression in cancer (2021–2026). In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand for his contributions to pathology and cancer research.