Dr Darius Lane
PhD

Dr. Lane is a mid-career biomedical research scientist. He has been an NHMRC Peter Doherty/Cancer Institute NSW Fellow (2011-14), and has more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and >2800 citations. 

Darius completed a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology as a Sir James McNeil Scholar at Monash University in 2008 examining the differences in iron metabolism between normal and cancer cells. He discovered a new cellular uptake mechanism for iron that is driven by ascorbate and has since been shown to be universal in a wide range of species, including plants.

Darius then moved to the laboratory of Prof. Des Richardson at the University of Sydney to identify druggable links in iron-controlled metabolic and cell signaling pathways that could be targeted with newly developed small-molecule inhibitors in leukaemia, melanoma, prostate cancer and breast cancer. Here, Darius was awarded concurrent NHRMC Peter Doherty and Cancer Institute NSW Early Career Fellowships, and he was subsequently awarded an inaugural AMP Tomorrow Maker award (<1% success rate, Australia-wide) and a recent NHMRC Project Grant.

Darius moved back to Melbourne in 2017 with his wife and three young children to join Prof. Ashley Bush's Oxidation Biology Unit at the Melbourne Dementia Research Centre, in order to apply his cross-disciplinary understanding of iron biology and molecular networks to decipher the emerging pathological roles of iron and lipid peroxidation in major neurodegenerative and neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.