Professor Maija Kohonen-Corish is a Research Leader at the MQ-affiliated Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and the head of Woolcock Centre for Lung Cancer. She joined Macquarie University in April 2023.

Maija is a Human Genetics Society of Australasia-certified molecular geneticist (MHGSA) with a track record of discovery in basic and translational research in lung and colorectal cancer. 

Maija completed a BSc and MSc at the University of Helsinki in Finland. This was followed by a PhD at John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra. There she established one of the first laboratories in Australia to identify inherited gene defects in Lynch Syndrome. Maija is a member of the Variant Interpretation Committee of International Society for Gastrointestinal Hereditary Tumours (InSiGHT), which produces international guidelines on how to interpret the pathogenicity of Lynch Syndrome gene variants.

Maija was a Cancer Institute NSW Fellow and the head of lung and colon cancer research at Garvan Institute of Medical Research 2002-2017. She was appointed to lead the Woolcock Centre for Lung Cancer in 2019. 

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Professor Kohonen-Corish has identified several tumour biomarkers of prognosis and therapeutic responsiveness which have improved the clinical management of cancer patients. Maija has also discovered novel biomarkers which have provided important mechanistic insight and potential drug targets for cancer treatment. For example, she discovered the significance of MCC as a tumour suppressor gene which is epigenetically silenced in colon tumours and causes a novel DNA repair defect. Maija has extensively utilised mouse models of cancer in her research and developed a new model for an aggressive type of proximal colon cancer that has been adopted by other researchers.

At the Woolcock Maija leads the Lung Cancer Network and a research program on harnessing the microbiome to improve cancer therapies, in collaboration with Microbiome Research Centre UNSW, Macquarie Hospital, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, Royal Prince Alfred and other hospitals. 

Her team is developing new interventions that allow more effective use of standard cancer therapies. These include creating diagnostic microbiome-based tools to determine which patients will benefit from additional treatment interventions. The team recently demonstrated that taking a certain kind of antibiotic during chemotherapy is associated with greatly increased survival time of people with late-stage lung cancer.