Associate Professor Rodger Tiedemann, MBChB PhD FRACP FRCPA, has recently re-joined the Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology as Associate Professor and the Antony and Margaret Morris Fellow in Cancer Research after nearly two decades overseas at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, USA, and at The Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto, Canada. He is co-appointed to the Cancer and Blood Service at Auckland City Hospital as a Consultant Hematologist and remains affiliated with the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, as a senior scientist and principal investigator of the Tiedemann Lab.
Rodger is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia. He achieved Medicine and Surgery degrees and a PhD in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Auckland in 1998. His doctoral studies examined the basis of superantigen-induced immune cell activation and were completed under the supervision of Professor John Fraser.
Prior to medical training, Rodger was a national representative at the 29th International Mathematics Olympiad and a prize winner in the Australian Mathematics Competition. Following Hematology training, he completed post-doctoral research in multiple myeloma (MM) at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ, USA under the mentorship of Drs. Keith Stewart, Leif Bergsagel and Rafael Fonseca. He then joined the staff at Mayo Clinic as Senior Associate Consultant Hematologist in 2008 and Assistant Professor at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in 2009. From genome wide RNAi screening studies he identified XPO1 and MCL1 as critical druggable vulnerabilities in MM cells.
This work provided the impetus for the development of Selinexor (an XPO1 inhibitor) for the treatment of myeloma, which was FDA approved in 2020. After moving to Toronto, Canada, in 2010 Rodger’s laboratory research program led to the discovery of immature MM stem and progenitor cells that may prevent cure with current treatments. He was made Associate Professor at the University of Toronto in 2016. For his translational research, he received an American Society of Hematology (ASH) Scholar Award in 2009 and the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) Rawls Prize in 2018.
Current projects in his lab are aimed at the deep characterization of MM progenitor cells using single cell multi-omics; exploration of the role of genomic copy number aberrations (CNA) such as gain(1q) in MM cell biology; and the development of novel immunotherapeutics for MM and other plasma cell-based disorders.