Anne-Maree Pearse

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Anne-Maree Pearse
Alma materUniversity of Sydney

University of Tasmania

Known forDevil facial tumour disease
Awards2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize

2012 Prince Hitachi Prize

Scientific career
FieldsCytogenetics

Anne-Maree Pearse is an Australian

contagious cancer that affects Tasmanian devils
. For this she has won multiple awards, including the 2012 Prince Hitachi Prize for Comparative Oncology.

Education

Pearse graduated from the University of Sydney in 1972 before starting an MSc at the University of Tasmania in 1976.[1] During her Masters she worked on the flea, Uropsylla tasmanica, which is a flea that infects quolls and Tasmanian devils.[1] She was unable to complete her PhD due to symptoms of progressive and severe degenerative disc disease.[2]

Career

Pearse worked in the Cytogenetics Laboratory at the

Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, Tasmanian Government, in 2004 after hearing about the disease on the radio.[1][4]

Large red tumours protrude from the face of a Tasmanian devil
Tumours protrude from the face of a Tasmanian devil

In 2006, Pearse and her colleague Swift published a paper on their findings on DFTD in Nature.[7] In their report they studied tumours from eleven Tasmanian devils. They observed that the tumours had major chromosomal abnormalities and these abnormalities were the same between individual animals. This led them to conclude that the tumour cells in different animals were of the same clonal origin. As a result, they proposed the hypothesis that "the disease is transmitted by allograft, whereby an infectious cell line is passed directly between the animals through bites they inflict on one another.".[7]

Since then, other scientists have added further evidence to the Allograft Theory of DFTD whilst Pearse has continued to uncover new information on the disease.[8] In particular, she has investigated how the disease mutates in Tasmanian Devil populations.[9] The conclusion of this research is "that DFTD should not be treated as a static entity, but rather as an evolving parasite with epigenetic plasticity".[10]

These findings have implications in humans in terms of donor-derived malignancy in organ transplantation and transmission of a malignancy between a mother and a fetus or between twin fetuses.[2]

Awards and honours

  • 2011 Australian Museum Sherman Eureka Prize for Environmental Research (shared)[11]
  • 2012 Prince Hitachi Prize for Comparative Oncology[1][9]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "The Awardee of the 2012 Prince Hitachi Prize for Comparative Oncology". jfcr.or.jp. Retrieved 23 March 2019.
  2. ^ a b "The Prince Hitachi Prize for Comparative Oncology | 2012Awardee". www.jfcr.or.jp. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
  3. PMID 2147643
    .
  4. ^
    ISSN 0274-7529
    .
  5. PMID 3013953
    .
  6. ISSN 0017-789X
    . Retrieved 23 March 2019.
  7. ^
    S2CID 4409863
    .
  8. S2CID 28432058
    .
  9. ^ a b "Devil scientist wins Japanese prize". ABC News. 1 March 2011. Retrieved 24 June 2019.
  10. PMID 23135679
    .
  11. ^ "The Australian Museum Eureka Prize Winners for 2011". theaustralian.com.au. 6 September 2011. Retrieved 23 March 2019.
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