Luke is a PhD candidate at Adelaide University within the precision medicine theme at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI). His research focuses on the most common childhood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), and its dissemination to the central nervous system (CNS) (CNS-ALL). 

Involvement of the CNS in ALL is common, necessitating intensive CNS-directed therapy for every patient. This therapy is neurotoxic, particularly to the developing brain, which can lead to lifelong neurocognitive impairments. The persistence of CNS-ALL has long predicted poor clinical outcomes, but the biological basis of this persistence is incompletely understood and represents a critical barrier to improving patient care. Luke’s work aims to define targetable mechanisms that underpin CNS disease persistence in ALL and to translate these findings into improved therapeutic strategies that overcome current limitations in CNS-directed therapy.

His project centers on the development of physiologically relevant disease models to recapitulate and study the characteristics of CNS-ALL. He has established a model of the CNS-niche in vitro by incorporating key microenvironmental features of the CNS to elucidate leukemia cell characteristics and screen drug efficacy. He has also engineered patient-derived xenograft models of ALL to track leukemia progression using bioluminescent imaging, enabling live assessment of drug efficacy and acquisition of leukemic cells from the CNS. 

Using these models, Luke integrates multi-omics approaches, combining RNA sequencing and untargeted proteomics and metabolomics to systematically identify concordant molecular characteristics and therapeutic vulnerabilities for CNS-ALL. His Methodological expertise includes murine models, co-culture systems, high-throughput drug screening, lentiviral transduction, flow cytometry, RNA-seq, LC-MS proteomics and metabolomics, and R-based computational analysis.