Seven researchers at Peter Mac have been awarded 2022 Victorian Cancer Agency (VCA)’s Early and Mid-Career Fellowships.

The fellowships are designed to help support promising early career researchers who are undertaking high quality translational cancer research.  

Translational research is the interface between laboratory-based research where fundamental discoveries are made and clinical research where treatments are tested in patients.  It is effectively moving research from the laboratory to the clinic. 

Professor Mark Dawson, Associate Director of Research Translation at Peter Mac said, “The research proposals are all outstanding and have the potential to change the way we treat and manage a range of cancers.”

Congratulations to the following mid-career research fellowship recipients:

• Dr Dale Garsed is characterising tumour samples from ovarian cancer survivors and patients who had extraordinary responses to cancer drugs, to uncover how some women survive against the odds and use this information to improve survival outcomes of all women with ovarian cancer.  

Dr Garsed will use high-resolution molecular profiling and computational models to identify features associated with exceptionally good and poor survival, and determine the most important features by testing them in independent clinical samples. This study is designed to improve treatment decisions and outcome predictions at diagnosis, and inform the development of new treatment strategies for patients with ovarian cancer.

• Dr Lorey Smith aims to prevent therapy resistance in melanoma. Unfortunately, melanoma cells are particularly clever and change their characteristics to avoid being detected by the immune system and to develop resistance to treatments.

Dr Smith will develop an understanding of how melanoma cells adapt and change in response to therapy and will use this knowledge to find new ways to stop melanoma from developing resistance to treatment.  

• Dr Clare Slaney will use mRNA vaccine technology to develop new ways to use the body’s own immune response to fight cancer.

Currently a treatment that takes your own immune T-cells and genetically engineers them to fight cancer is being used to treat some blood cancers, but its effect in solid tumours is limited. Dr Slaney and her team will use novel mRNA vaccine technology as a platform to make these T-cells work in difficult solid cancers including pancreatic cancer. 

Congratulations to the following early career research fellowship recipients:

• Dr Heidi Fettke who will be assessing circulating tumour DNA (cancer DNA that has leaked into the blood stream) and outcomes with a treatment in advanced prostate cancer.  

Dr Fettke aims to use circulating tumour DNA to identify which advanced prostate cancer patients will respond to or develop resistance to Lutetium-PSMA (Lu-PSMA).  

• Dr Alexander Lewis aims to understand the biological activity of the metabolite/molecule, heme in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).   

Unfortunately there are few treatment options available to treat AML and in this project Dr Lewis aims to understand the role of heme metabolism in leukaemia cells.  Heme synthesis/production is altered in AML and so by gaining a better understanding of heme metabolism he aims to develop more effective treatments for AML.   

• Dr Criselle Dsouza is developing a new adoptive cell therapy for T cell lymphoma, another type of blood cancer.

This project aims to develop an immune based T cell therapy to specifically target the tumour cells by using universal donor T cells. It is hoped that this new therapy will improve patient outcomes.  

• Dr Minyu Wang aims to enhance the immunotherapy response in melanoma through the development of a test to detect which patients will respond to treatment.

Dr Wang will also use this knowledge to develop novel or new combination therapies for people that do not respond to current treatments.   

For more information or an interview contact the Peter Mac Communications team on 0417 123 048.

The world-first clinical trial platform will hand scientists a powerful new tool to track how potential new therapies work. Tumour samples will be collected for comparison before and after treatment with novel therapies, to yield new insights into how they affect the brain.

With survival gains lagging those seen for other cancers, Dr Jim Whittle says Brain-POP (brain perioperative) was part of efforts to “radically change the way that drugs are developed and the way that clinical trials are run for brain cancer”.

“The Brain-POP platform offers a unique approach to help us test whether a drug actually gets into the brain and find out if it’s having the effect we want,” says Dr Whittle, who is Lab Head at The Brain Cancer Centre and also a Peter Mac oncologist.

“This is what we need to invest our efforts into - the most powerful and promising therapies, stopping the development of those that don’t work and delivering far better outcomes for brain cancer patients.

“We hope that by demonstrating the effectiveness of our unique trial method, we can scale Brain-POP nationally so that every patient diagnosed in Australia will in future have access to this new standard of care.”

The initiative, which has just received $16 million Victorian Government funding, will be led by The Brain Cancer Centre along with research partners WEHI, The Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH), The Royal Children’s Hospital and also Peter Mac.

Minister for Innovation, Medical Research and the Digital Economy, The Hon Jaala Pulford MP, said the funding over four years would support a globally unique research program benefiting children, adolescents and adults with primary brain cancer and brain metastases.  

"We urgently need to find more effective and curative treatments for brain cancers. As a global leader in cancer care and medical research, Victoria is perfectly positioned to lead this ground-breaking work," Minister Pulford said.  

Professor Kate Drummond, RMH Director of Neurosurgery, said the integrated trial program would draw on expertise from researchers and clinicians across Melbourne’s biomedical precinct and "establish Victoria at the forefront of brain cancer research”.

One Australian is diagnosed with brain cancer every five hours and more children die from brain cancer in Australia than any other disease.

Contacts:

For more information contact the Peter Mac Communications team on 0417 123 048.

Or WEHI communications on 0475 751 811 / [email protected]