Andrew Biankin

Biankin, who works as the Regius Professor of Surgery at the University of Glasgow, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for 2019, for distinguished service to medical research, and to the treatment of pancreatic cancer, as a clinician-scientist.

Analysing data from ICGC and The Cancer Genome Atlas, Biankin and his team realised it would be possible to design a molecular/genomic test for 95% of solid tumours across the range of cancers and in 2019 the Glasgow Cancer Test was released for assessment in the real-world setting of the NHS and from November 2019 became available for research, including for clinical trials, from Agilent Technologies, which holds a non-exclusive global distribution licence. There is also a Glasgow Cancer Test for haematological cancers.

In 2018 Biankin took over as Executive Director and Chairman of the International Cancer Genome Consortium and set about developing the Accelerated Research for Genomic Oncology (ICGC-ARGO) initiative.

In 2013, as Regius Professor of Surgery, Biankin also took up the Directorship of the Wolfson Wohl Cancer Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, and established the Glasgow Precision Oncology Laboratory (GPOL) in 2016 to develop a molecular test to drive his planned precision oncology clinical trials program for pancreatic cancer - Precision-Panc.

Following the death of his mentor, Sutherland, from pancreatic cancer in 2012, Biankin focused on analytics and the importance of developing a molecular diagnostic/prognostic test that could guide treatment and the placement of patients into clinical trials. To this end, Biankin co-founded Cure Forward in the USA, where he was the chief medical and scientific advisor from 2012 until 2017, but encountered issues of the reliability, timeliness and cost of existing tests and scalability.

In 2009, Biankin and Sean Grimmond established the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative (APGI) – the pancreatic cancer arm of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC). The APGI went on to map and upload the complete DNA read-outs for around 400 pancreatic cancers to the ICGC project, making it one of the largest sets of whole genome sequences for any cancer type. This work took pancreatic cancer from one of the least genetically characterised cancers to one of the best.

Following a postdoctoral position at Johns Hopkins University, USA, to further develop his scientific skills, he returned to Sydney in 2004 to establish a pancreatic cancer program at the Garvan Institute, setting up the New South Wales Pancreatic Cancer Network and then the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Network. With senior surgeon Dr Neil Merrit, Biankin established a hepatobiliary unit at Bankstown Hospital, Sydney, and in 2007, with a focus on translational research, began integrating this clinical practice with emerging precision oncology research.

His PhD project was an early personalised medicine approach that looked at why patients respond differently to treatment, despite the similarity of the tumours under the microscope. He continued to hone his surgical skills in the clinic. He finished his PhD in translational research at the end of 2002.

Initially enrolling in a pharmacy degree in 1983, Biankin then transferred to medicine the following year, graduating with his medical degree from the University of New South Wales in 1992.