Senior Research Fellow
Research interests
Dr Martina Paumann-Page's main research interest is how oxidants of mammalian peroxidases are involved in health and disease. Currently, she investigates the role of peroxidasin, a recently identified extracellular peroxidase, which is upregulated in numerous types of cancers including metastatic melanoma. Her work showed that high peroxidasin is associated with increased invasiveness in metastatic melanoma and recent results highlighted a causative role of PXDN in invasion by promoting an invasive phenotype.
Dr Paumann-Page seeks to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of how peroxidasin regulates invasion and what its effects are on cancer cells and the tumour microenvironment. Her work aims at providing a basis for novel therapeutic approaches to reduce metastasis.
More recently she has become interested how oxidative stress can be exploited to make cancer cells more susceptible to cell death by targeting their oxidative defence mechanisms.
Her work has been supported by a Marsden project grant (AI), Canterbury Medical Research Foundation project grants (PI), a Health Research Council project grant (AI) and a Cancer Research Trust NZ project grant (PI).