Biography

Dr Jermaine Coward is a consultant medical oncologist specialising in gynaecological and thoracic cancers. 

He was appointed as a UK Medical Research Council Clinical Fellow at Barts Cancer Institute, London (2006) and conducted basic research into the role of IL-6 in ovarian cancer. This included the first translational clinical trial of anti-IL-6 antibody therapy in patients with platinum resistant ovarian cancer and this work culminated in his PhD award in 2010. Immediately after completing specialist oncology training at the world renowned Royal Marsden Hospital, London (2012), he was appointed as a Senior Research Fellow and Leader of the Inflammation and Cancer Therapeutics Group at Mater Research now housed at the Translational Research Institute.

He has recently published in leading journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Cancer Research and Clinical Cancer Research. In 2011 he also published a seminal review on ovarian cancer in Nature Reviews Cancer. As evidence of the impact of his work in the last 2 years his manuscripts have been cited >200 times.

He currently has a number of high profile collaborations with researchers at Peter MacCallum and MD Anderson Cancer Centres with a focus on investigating the role of inflammatory cytokine networks in ovarian cancer. He is currently funded by the Cancer Council Queensland and the remit of his research revolves around efficient translation of novel bench-side discoveries in cancer related inflammation into nimble combinatorial clinical trials.

Alongside this, he is a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, School of Medicine and regularly delivers talks at national and international conferences in addition to fundraising events which help raise community awareness in gynaecological cancers.