Emmy Dorothee Grace Fleuren

I am a Team Leader at Children's Cancer Institute and Conjoint Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales with >12 years of research expertise and a dedication to improve outcomes for young patients with a difficult-to-treat type of cancer called sarcoma. In 2019, I relocated from London, UK, to join Children's Cancer Institute to set up and lead an independent program on sarcoma, and established the Sarcoma Biology and Therapeutics group. This is Australia’s first and only research laboratory solely focussed on sarcomas affecting the young. Our mission: finding better and kinder treatments for these young patients, and make new drugs a treatment reality. We do this by strategically coupling the wealth of data generated in Australia’s national precision medicine program for children with cancer: the ZERO Childhood Cancer Program, in which I hold leadership positions (Sarcoma Subject Matter Expert, co-lead Preclinical Working Group), with innovative techniques, such as phosphoproteomics, and a robust functional validation framework. Our laboratory discoveries have already directly influenced clinical decision-making in the ZERO program, with promising clinical results. Our goal for the next years is to drive transformative contributions for more sarcoma patients. Main research activities of my team include: • Multi-omics characterisation of paediatric sarcoma patients within the ZERO Childhood Cancer program (linking genomics, transcriptomics and methylation profiles to in vitro, in vivo, and patient drug efficacy data) • Evaluate phosphoproteomics for the identification of activated drug targets not identified with ZERO's current molecular platform in paediatric sarcoma patients • Pinpoint mechanism-of-action and predictive response biomarkers for targeted drugs with extraordinary efficacies in in vitro paediatric sarcoma models that lack a known molecular response marker (“unexpected extraordinary responders”) Multi-omics characterisation of paediatric sarcoma patients within the ZERO Childhood Cancer program (linking genomics, transcriptomics and methylation profiles to in vitro, in vivo, and patient drug efficacy data); Evaluate phosphoproteomics for the identification of activated drug targets not identified with ZERO's current molecular platform in paediatric sarcoma patients; Pinpoint mechanism-of-action and predictive response biomarkers for targeted drugs with extraordinary efficacies in in vitro paediatric sarcoma models that lack a known molecular response marker (“unexpected extraordinary responders”)

Preprint: Fordham AM, Brown LM, …, Ekert PG, Fleuren EDG. Comprehensive multi-platform tyrosine kinase profiling reveals novel actionable FGFR aberrations across pediatric and AYA sarcomas. Published online on BioRxiv preprint 21 July 2023: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.19.548825v1 Lau L, Khuong-Quang DA, (+19), Fleuren EDG, (+20), Marshall GM‡, Ziegler DS‡. Precision-guided treatment improves outcomes for children with high-risk cancers. Nat Med. 2024 (online 6 June 2024) Brown LM, Ekert PG, Fleuren EDG. Biological and clinical implications of FGFR aberrations in paediatric and young adult cancers. Oncogene 2023;42(23):1875-1888. Fleuren EDG, Vlenterie M, van der Graaf WTA. Recent advances on anti-angiogenic multi-receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors in osteosarcoma and E