Rate My Professor Cath Drummond

Dr Cath Drummond serves as a Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago. She holds a BSc(Hons) and PhD. Her research programme centres on two primary areas: understanding the phenomenon of drug tolerance in cancer, where she investigates how cancer cells transition to drug-tolerant states that enable survival and eventual resistance to targeted therapies; and identifying small molecule inhibitors of oncogenic p53 variants. These efforts are supported by a Marsden project grant in collaboration with Dr Glen Reid and funding from the Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand with Professor Antony Braithwaite. Drummond is an Associate Member of the American Association for Cancer Research since 2016 and an Associate Investigator at the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Discovery since 2019.

Drummond contributes to education through supervision of PGDip MLSc and PhD candidates, tutoring in ELM2 (clinical pathology) and PSCI 202 (Medicines and Disease), and guest lecturing in PATH 302. Her scholarly output includes recent publications such as 'MicroRNA mimics based on the miR-15/107 consensus sequence sensitise NSCLC cells to targeted therapy' (2026, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, with C. Carpenter et al.); 'Δ133p53 isoform enhances TLR4 function to promote tumour growth' (2025, Carcinogenesis, with S. Polwatta Lekamlage et al.); and earlier works like 'A DHODH inhibitor increases p53 synthesis and enhances tumor cell death' (2018). She has presented at conferences, including Queenstown Research Week meetings in 2024 on topics such as drug repurposing for drug tolerant persisters and the role of lncRNA MALAT1 in lung adenocarcinoma drug resistance. Her work advances knowledge in cancer therapy resistance mechanisms and p53-related pathways.