Dr Lisa Philp

Dr Lisa K Philp is an early career researcher at the Australian Prostate Cancer Research Centre-Queensland. During her studies, Dr Philp’s research had a strong metabolic, endocrine and nutrition focus. She completed her Honours degree under the supervision of Prof Caroline McMillen in the Early Origins of Adult Disease Laboratory, investigating the effect of maternal diet on the in utero and postnatal metabolic phenotype of offspring. Subsequently she gained an Australia Postgraduate Award and completed a PhD in Medicine supervised by Prof Gary Wittert, a leading endocrinologist and researcher with strong interests in obesity and men’s health. During her PhD, Dr Philp examined the differential effects of saturated and omega-3 dietary fats on obesity and body composition in male and female mice, with keen focus on exploring diet- and gender-specific changes to mediators of lipid and glucose metabolism in two key metabolic organs, the liver and skeletal muscle.

Due to her keen interest in developing expertise in another critical aspect of men’s health, prostate cancer, Dr Philp joined the Adelaide Prostate Cancer Research Centre at the Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories. Here she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow under the tutelage of A/Prof Lisa Butler and Prof Wayne Tilley. In her 3 years at DRMCRL, she was instrumental in generating a novel patient progression cohort based on Gleason grade and a series of tissue microarrays that she used as a tool to investigate specific protein changes occurring in the initiation and disease progression of prostate cancer. She was also involved in optimising and applying automated Definiens Developer and Tissue Studio analysis software to the immunohistochemistry quantification workflow at DRMCRL. An outstanding achievement was Dr Philp’s role in leading a small research team in characterising the phenotype of a novel mouse model of altered androgen action, small glutamine-rich tetratricopeptide repeat-containing protein alpha knockout mice.

Due to her ambition to merge her research interests in prostate cancer and metabolism, in October 2014 Dr Philp joined the APCRC-Q to research the underlying endocrine and metabolic changes associated with advanced prostate cancer. Here she is under the tutelage of Prof Colleen Nelson and Dr Jennifer Gunter.