Rate My Professor Lisa Butler

Professor Lisa Butler is a full-time academic researcher at the South Australian Immunogenomics Cancer Institute and the Freemasons Centre for Male Health and Wellbeing at the University of Adelaide. She serves as Program Lead for Resistance Prevention, Head of the Prostate Cancer Research Group, and holds executive positions in the Australian Prostate Cancer BioResource, Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, and Australian and New Zealand Urogenital and Prostate Cancer Trials Group. Additionally, she is Director of the Solid Tumour Program at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute. Butler obtained her BSc in 1993, BSc (Hons) in 1994, and PhD in 1998 from the University of Adelaide, followed by postdoctoral studies at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York from 1998 to 2001, where her work contributed to the clinical development of histone deacetylase inhibitors as anticancer agents.

Butler has established an internationally recognized research program targeting androgen signalling in prostate cancer, discovering innovative biomarkers of treatment response, and testing novel drugs. She developed a unique ex vivo tumor culture model that replicates individual patient responses, adopted by institutions including the University of Leuven, Thomas Jefferson University, UT Southwestern, and the Royal Marsden Hospital. Her group demonstrated the anti-proliferative efficacy of the heat shock protein 90 inhibitor AUY922 and cyclin dependent kinase inhibitor ribociclib in prostate cancer tissues, leading to a Cancer Australia-funded clinical trial of ribociclib. From 2015 to 2021, she led a Movember Revolutionary Team investigating lipids in prostate cancer and biomarkers of aggressiveness, and in 2019 received US Department of Defense funding to study lipid metabolising enzymes. Other interests include combinatorial strategies targeting the androgen receptor and lipid metabolism pathways. Career appointments include Cancer Council Principal Research Fellow (2018-2022), Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2014-2018), University Senior Research Fellow (2012-2013), and earlier fellowships. Awards encompass the Cancer Council SA Women in Leadership Award (2021), ILEX Oncology Scholar-in-Training Award (2003), Bio-Rad New Investigator Award (2002), and Gerald B. Grindey Scholar in Training Award (2001). Key publications include 'Personalized intensification of treatment for hormone-sensitive prostate cancer' (2026, Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology), 'ACSM1 and ACSM3 regulate fatty acid metabolism to support prostate cancer growth and constrain ferroptosis' (2024, Cancer Research), 'Peroxisomal β-oxidation enzyme, DECR2, regulates lipid metabolism and promotes treatment resistance in advanced prostate cancer' (2024, British Journal of Cancer), 'Lipidomic profiling of clinical prostate cancer reveals targetable alterations in membrane lipid composition' (2021, Cancer Research), and 'ELOVL5 is a critical and targetable fatty acid elongase in prostate cancer' (2021, Cancer Research). Her research has over 13,500 citations on Google Scholar, impacting global prostate cancer studies. She serves on editorial boards for Molecular Cancer Research and Frontiers in Endocrinology, and delivers public lectures on prostate cancer research.