Robert D. Ladner, PhD was appointed to the post of Reader in the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast in 2015.

Dr. Ladner was awarded his MSc and PhD from Rutgers University/The University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey, where he performed his graduate research. It was during this time that Dr. Ladner identified and characterized the sequence of human dUTPase and its variants and was among the first to unravel the complex mechanisms and cellular consequences of the uracil-DNA misincorporation pathway and the mechanisms of resistance to a class of chemotherapies known as thymidylate synthase (TS) inhibitors. This was closely followed by the first report of a strong association between dUTPase overexpression and clinical resistance to 5-fluorouracil in colorectal cancer.

In 2004, Dr Ladner was subsequently recruited to the post of Assistant-Professor at the University of Southern California Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center where he initiated a collaborative drug development strategy to develop novel chemotherapeutics targeting uracil-DNA repair and to develop new synthetic lethal strategies that exploit the uracil-DNA misincorporation pathway during treatment with TS inhibitors. In 2014 Dr. Ladner became Founder and CEO of CV6 Therapeutics, a drug development company dedicated to developing novel treatments to improve the effectiveness of currently approved cancer drugs and inflammatory conditions.