Chief Executive Officer, ONJCRI
Head, Blood Cancer and Immunotherapy Lab
Head, La Trobe University’s School of Cancer Medicine

As Chief Executive Officer of the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI), Professor Marco Herold’s goal is to improve treatments and outcomes for cancer patients. He leads staff and students to ensure discoveries are translated into the clinic to benefit cancer patients and deliver maximum benefit to the community.

Prof Herold is a NHMRC L2 Investigator, an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a former Broomhead Centenary Fellow. He completed my PhD and first postdoctoral studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany, where he trained in cell death research and mouse genetics. During this time, he worked with German pharmaceutical company Taconic Artemis, developing methods to establish novel pre-clinical models of disease.

He moved to Australia in 2008 and joined the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), where he served as a Laboratory Head in the Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division and Head of the Melbourne Genome Editing Centre (MAGEC). His research team specialised in applying CRISPR gene editing techniques to identify critical gene targets required for the development and sustained growth of cancer cells. His team identified DNA repair as fundamental for TP53-mediated tumour suppression (Janic et al., Nature Medicine 2018).

His current research is focused on using advanced genome-wide CRISPR screening, including gene activation and base editing in vitro and in vivo (Deng et al., Nature Communications, 2022). ONJCRI researchers use these research techniques to amplify the research conducted within all our labs to discover drug resistance factors and targets that enhance immune therapies.

Since joining ONJCRI in 2023, Prof Herold’s primary role as CEO of ONJCRI is to steer the Institute towards achieving its strategic priorities.