Professor Paul Neeson completed a PhD in the Pathology Dept at the University of Melbourne, followed by a post-doc in the Paterson lab at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He heads up a lab in the Cancer Immunology program at the PeterMac and co-chairs the personalized care program for the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre.

Paul has worked in the human cancer immunotherapy field for the past 20 years and is now a key leader in the tumour immune microenvironment (TME) and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell fields. Paul has led his own research group since 2016, his central working hypothesis is that the TME is a key driver of immunotherapy failure in patients with refractory cancer. His team has focused on identifying these mechanisms of immunotherapy resistance. To do this he adopted a multi-omic approach to derive high dimensional TME data at a single cell and spatial level. Using this information, he is developing strategies to target immunotherapy mechanisms of resistance. This includes combining conventional treatments (eg radiation) with immunotherapy to convert immune ‘cold’ to hot’ tumors, gene editing and drug screens to rescue antigen expression, engineering novel CAR-T cells (eg. switch CARs) to be resistant to TME-derived cytokines, or progenitor memory T cells with enhanced persistence and in vivo tumour control. He has a particular focus on developing improved immunotherapy strategies in GU cancers (prostate and renal), melanoma and paediatric solid cancers. Indeed, he has worked closely with industry partners and clinicians to translate his labs findings into the clinic. In recognition of his work he has been awarded research grants from NHMRC, NGOs and industry, published over 125 papers, and was recently admitted to the Faculty of Science of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia.