Dr. Hawkins’ research career has focused on understanding how immune cells and cancers grow, die and differentiate. By studying these processes, we have gained great insight into how the immune system protects us from infection, but also how cancer can develop when this machinery fails. To explore this, Dr. Hawkins has pioneered the new types of microscopy that allows us to directly watch these processes in action. To achieve this, Dr. Hawkins developed new imaging technology and collected data on thousands of individual cells and their descendants. These studies formed the foundation for groundbreaking studies in the field of immunology including work published in Science.

Recently, Dr. Hawkins has developed a groundbreaking system so we can acquire data on immune and cancer cells at an unprecedented level of resolution. 3D printed optical windows are surgically implanted into bones of living models of disease processes. Using 2-photon microscopy, these optical windows can be used to repeatedly review and re-assess the very same anatomical site in the same living tissue every day over weeks. With this impactful technology we can now visualise in real time, the emergence of individual cancer cells and clones responsible for the deaths of many Australians every year.

﻿Dr. Hawkins has used this approach to generate 3 dimensional maps of the entire bone tissue as blood cancers develop from a few single transformed cancer cells into fully infiltrated tissue over the period of weeks. Perhaps even more importantly, this approach has been used to ‘watch’ the selection of resistant cancer cells as we can visualise the response of cancer cells during chemotherapy, a key issue with respect to overall outcome in many aggressive blood cancers, and indeed many other types of cancer. With this information, we are understanding better ways of treating cancer and immune disease.







