SAiGENCI recruit recognised with prestigious award

Internationally recognised cancer expert, Professor Brendan Jenkins, has received the International Cytokine and Interferon Society (ICIS) 2023 Distinguished Service Award. He will be presented with the award at the annual ICIS conference in Athens, Greece, in October this year.

Professor Jenkins has been appointed as the Program Head for the Tumour Inflammation and Immunotherapy Program at the South Australian ImmunoGENomics Cancer Institute (SAiGENCI), which operates within the University of Adelaide’s Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, and is supported by an alliance with the Central Adelaide Local Health Network (CALHN).

He will start his new role on 3 July 2023.

The ICIS Distinguished Service Award is in recognition of Professor Jenkins’s reputation in the community as an outstanding cytokine scientist in the immunology, inflammation and cancer research fields, and a dedicated member of the ICIS.

He has served as the lead organiser of the organisation’s annual meeting in Melbourne in 2014, as a member of the inaugural ICIS Council, and as the Chair of the ICIS Meetings Committee since 2016.

Professor Jenkins specialises in the role of innate immunity in precancerous inflammatory conditions such as gastritis and pancreatitis, and inflammation-associated cancers, in particular gastric (stomach), pancreatic and lung cancers.

As part of his role at SAiGENCI, Professor Jenkins will help build immunology expertise at the University of Adelaide.

The knowledge gained by his research has already had a significant impact on biomarker and drug development and in multiple scientific and medical fields, including cancer biology, oncology, immunology, gastroenterology and respiratory medicine.

Professor Jenkins is currently the Centre Director, Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne.