He recently gave a talk on ''Clinical Genomics: The Next Generation of Personalised Medicine'' during a New Zealand Society for Oncology annual conference on cancer research and treatment, hosted last week at the Dunedin Centre.
Dr Fellowes, who has a PhD in pathology from the University of Otago, is the scientist in charge of molecular diagnostic development at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, in Melbourne, the state of Victoria, Australia.
The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre is Australia's only public hospital solely dedicated to cancer treatment and research.
Falling costs now made it feasible for all cancer patients to have their tumours profiled for genetic changes, he said.
Personalised cancer care was now ''critically dependent on a fusion of the disciplines of molecular genetics, genomics, bioinformatics and pathology''.
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field that involves storing and analysing biological data.
Clinical genomics was a developing field which aimed to characterise the specific genetic and epigenetic changes in individual cancers to identify ''drivers of tumour progression, inform diagnosis, determine prognosis, and guide appropriate treatment'', he said.
A leading University of Otago biochemist and geneticist, Prof Parry Guilford, who directs the university's Centre for Translational Cancer Research, said New Zealand and the rest of the world were ''at the tip of a very large wave'' of more personalised cancer diagnosis and treatment based on genomic analysis of individual tumours.
Powerful genomic-analysis technologies and the development of new DNA diagnostic markers would enable more exact analysis of tumours, and treatment tailored more precisely to the needs of individual patients.
Some tests were already available in New Zealand that could determine if individual patients would benefit from certain advanced new cancer drugs.
This was a ''very, very positive'' development because it would make it clearer how effective particular drugs were likely to be in treating individual patients, before potentially costly treatment was begun, Prof Guilford said.
Dr Fellowes said the Melbourne centre was 'implementing molecular diagnostic services'' for Victorian cancer patients and helping develop quicker DNA tests, based on relatively small numbers of key genomic areas and pathways.