A/Prof Chaffer has long standing expertise in breast cancer research. She has described for the first time that non-aggressive breast cancer cells can spontaneously convert into an extremely aggressive, metastatic, and therapy-resistant cell state. A therapeutic combination arising from this finding has entered the clinic as the first state-gating therapy to block the dynamic processes that lead to the emergence of new therapy-resistant cell states. Moreover, her group concomitantly discovered a biomarker to identify patients best-suited to this novel therapeutic strategy. This therapeutic approach has a transformative clinical potential across multiple cancer types.

To further our understanding of the breadth of plasticity programs at play in cancer, A/Prof Chaffer has worked with computational and machine learning expert Prof Krishnaswamy (Yale) to develop the capacity to uncover cell state trajectories from static single cell collected across a broad time course, and devised the causal gene regulatory networks underlying those trajectories. Continued computational development in this space is crucial for the meaningful analysis of single cell data and spatial transcriptomics to ensure the success of the program.

A/Prof Chaffer’s work has been published in Cell, Science, Cancer Discovery, PNAS and Nature Cell Biology.