Rate My Professor marian burr

Associate Professor Marian Burr is a clinician scientist, Snow Fellow, and Head of the Cancer Immunology and Epigenetics Laboratory at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, within the Division of Genome Sciences and Cancer. She earned her MBBS, BMedSci(Hons), MRCP, FRCPath, and PhD from the University of Cambridge. Burr completed medical school and early clinical training in the UK, followed by her PhD investigating MHC class I regulation in Professor Paul Lehner's laboratory. She underwent specialist clinical training in histopathology in Cambridge and advanced training in cancer epigenetics in Professor Mark Dawson’s laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, supported by a Cancer Research UK Clinician Scientist Fellowship starting in 2016. In 2021, she established her independent research program at ANU as a Snow Fellow and NHMRC Investigator, focusing on bridging clinical pathology and cancer immunology.

Her research specializes in cancer cell biology, epigenetics, and immune regulation, with a clinical emphasis on lung cancer and thoracic malignancies pathology. Burr employs genome-scale functional genetic screening to identify mechanisms of cancer immune evasion and strategies to overcome immunotherapy resistance. Notable publications include "Targeting Menin disrupts the KMT2A/B and polycomb balance to paradoxically activate bivalent genes" (Nature Cell Biology, 2023); "Inhibition of the CtBP complex and FBXO11 enhances MHC class II expression and anti-cancer immune responses" (Cancer Cell, 2022); "An evolutionarily conserved function of polycomb silences the MHC class I antigen presentation pathway and enables immune evasion in cancer" (Cancer Cell, 2019, reprinted in Cancer Cell ‘Best of 2019’); "CMTM6 maintains the expression of PD-L1 and regulates anti-tumour immunity" (Nature, 2017); and "MHC class I molecules are preferentially ubiquitinated on endoplasmic reticulum luminal residues during HRD1 ubiquitin E3 ligase-mediated dislocation" (PNAS, 2013). These high-impact contributions have influenced drug discovery programs targeting PD-L1 regulators and epigenetic inhibitors for enhanced anti-tumor immunity in solid and haematological cancers.