Dr Joshua Tobin
Group Leader
Dr Joshua Tobin is an emerging leader at Mater Research, driving innovation in personalised immunotherapy for blood cancers. As Co-Group Leader of the Blood Cancer Research Group alongside Professor Maher Gandhi, Dr Tobin is part of a team committed to transforming outcomes for patients with lymphoma and other hematologic malignancies. The group’s research spans fundamental immunology through to clinical translation, with a strong focus on understanding how the immune system interacts with cancer and how these insights can be leveraged to design and run novel personalised immunotherapy trials for Australian patients.
Dr Tobin’s work centres on identifying new targets for immune-therapy in both Hodgkins and Non Hodgkins lymphoma. His research explores how immune cells recognise cancer-specific neoantigens and how this recognition—or failure of it—shapes disease progression.
He is the national Principal Investigator for several landmark clinical trials, including:
- TREBL1 and TREBL2 – pioneering EBV-directed T-cell therapies targeting viral cancer antigens.
- CLARIFY – a national platform study identifying ultra-high-risk patients with large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL) for early immunotherapy intervention.
As a clinician-researcher, Dr Tobin bridges the gap between discovery and care, translating insights from the laboratory into clinical strategies that deliver personalised immunotherapy to patients. He is committed to building national capacity and ensuring equitable access by incorporating regional sites and designing infrastructure that enables broader application of cutting-edge therapies.
Through translating discoveries into an ambitious and novel portfolio of clinical trials, the Blood Cancer Research Group has established itself as a national leader in lymphoma research, with a strong emphasis on immune-oncology, biomarker discovery and microenvironmental vulnerabilities.