Dr Carl Sprung

Senior Scientist, Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases

Dr Carl Sprung obtained his PhD in biochemistry from the University of California in 1993. As a post-doctoral scientist from 1994 to 2001, he carried out cancer research investigations in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr Sprung uncovered the mechanism by which DNA repair occurred at the ends of chromosomes after DNA damage. In 2001 he joined the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre where he investigated high-throughput strategies to examine the molecular causes of adverse reactions in radiotherapy patients.

Dr Sprung joined MIMR in 2008 and is continuing his investigations using high throughput strategies to examine why some cancer patients are more prone to debilitating side effects from radiation treatment.

He has recently begun investigations that take advantage of the Australian Synchrotron as a tool to study microbeam radiotherapy (MRT). This is an emerging field for which amazing preliminary MRT results in animal models show relatively little healthy tissue damage with a high level of tumour cell killing. This could result in the increase of tumour control for many types of cancer.