Rate My Professor Theo Mantamadiotis

Associate Professor Theo Mantamadiotis is an esteemed researcher in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne, serving as Laboratory Head in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology within the School of Biomedical Sciences. With a PhD in Biomedical Science, he completed postdoctoral training as a scientist at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Germany and as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Patras in Greece. He transitioned to the University of Melbourne's Department of Pathology before joining the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in 2018. His research centers on the molecular and cellular biology of brain cancer, with a particular emphasis on glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). The Mantamadiotis laboratory investigates transcriptional and signalling networks critical to neuronal development, neural stem cells, and brain tumour cells, utilizing novel animal models of human nervous system pathology. Advanced methodologies, including massively parallel sequencing and next-generation sequencing for gene expression profiling of glioma cells, are employed to uncover molecular signatures, biomarkers, novel tumour development mechanisms, and drug targets. Central themes include the aberrant activation of PI3K, MAPK, and cAMP signalling pathways in GBM, where PI3K mutations in neural stem/progenitor cells promote glioma-like tumours, and CREB functions as a key transcriptional regulator of tumour growth. The lab also explores cAMP pathway modulation using approved drugs to induce apoptosis in glioma cells and examines immunobiology for brain tumour-targeted immunotherapy.