Dr Shom Goel

Dr Goel is a clinician-scientist at the University of Melbourne and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. His research group is focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying response and resistance to contemporary therapies for breast cancer. The team has particular strengths in the study of cell cycle inhibitors and their broad impacts on breast cancer biology.  The Goel Laboratory have developed several new transgenic models of breast cancer, which have proven valuable for uncovering new mechanisms of drug activity and resistance, and their work has been published in high-impact journals including Nature, Cancer Cell and Nature Cancer.

Dr Goel is a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. He completed medical school at the University of Adelaide, where he was awarded the Honours Alumni Medal as the top-ranked graduate across all faculties of the University. He then completed specialist training in Sydney, and there was awarded the Bryan Hudson Medal as the top-ranked candidate in the Royal Australasian College of Physicians’ Fellowship examination. Supported by the WG Walker Fulbright Scholarship (awarded to Australia’s highest-ranked Fulbright Scholar each year), he relocated to Boston to conduct his doctoral research at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He was subsequently awarded a Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and was then appointed as a Goldfarb-Rudkin Fellow in Breast Oncology at Dana-Farber in 2009. He joined the faculty of the Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School in 2012. He was also awarded the Dana-Farber’s inaugural J. Dirk Iglehart Fellowship in Breast Oncology.

Dr Goel’s research focuses on biological mechanisms underlying activity of, and resistance to, pharmacologic inhibitors of the cell cycle machinery – specifically cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6). He published the first study demonstrating how CDK4/6 inhibitors can rewire kinase circuitry within cancer cells, and another landmark paper describing how these agents modulate anti-tumour immune responses. His laboratory findings have been published in prestigious journals including Nature and Cancer Cell, and his seminal discoveries have translated directly from bench to the bedside through the opening of numerous international clinical trials. Dr Goel currently sits on a number of international advisory panels, leads several trials, and oversees the translational studies for two global randomized studies of CDK4/6 inhibitors in breast cancer.

He serves as either Global PI or Translational PI for four randomised clinical trials in breast cancer and was recently appointed Chair-Elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology Education Committee. Dr Goel is also a recent awardee of a prestigious Snow Fellowship which will accelerate his laboratory’s work from 2022 – 2030.