Once you’ve gone through cancer treatment, the next battle is remission and making sure the cancer doesn’t return.
This is an incredibly fearful time.
What if we could ensure permanent death of a cancer cell, while we’re treating it?
An Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship win for Dr Nicholas Fletcher will allow him and his team at the AIBN’s Centre for Advanced Imaging to examine these ‘holy grail’ treatments, with crucial input from their Industry Partner AdvanCell.
Dr Fletcher's $360,000 fellowship was one of 10 awarded to UQ researchers in the latest Advance Queensland round. The state government program is designed to foster innovation and future proof industry, with researchers partnering with industry to address barriers to growth, identify more effective and efficient ways of servicing customers, and developing new products.
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Sign up todayDr Fletcher says radiation therapy can damage or kill some cancer cells but there is a chance they can come back. Now, throgh this project, he has a chance to change that.
Here, Dr Fletcher breaks down the project:
“Targeted alpha therapies, or TATs, are extremely potent and have very localised delivery profiles. This means you can deliver this therapy to a tumour and cause localised cell death while limiting off-target damage to the rest of the body,” Dr Fletcher says.
“What we don't have a very good understanding of is the biological response around that, as in, how the body responds to the TAT and how the immune system responds to those dying cells in radiotherapy.
“There's some evidence that shows the immune system response is probably responsible for a lot of the actual therapy that we see, the hypothesis is that localised cell death can stimulate a broader immune response to cancer cells. This project is focused in part on finding markers for this response, identifying these would be a huge step forward in the field.
"The ideal outcome would be the ability to take a blood sample from a patient who's been given a TAT, look at how their immune system’s responding, and then use that to predict whether there’ll be a good or bad outcome, allowing tailoring of treatment regimens.
“That would be the holy grail.”
To fully investigate radiation therapy and cell death, Dr Fletcher's team at the AIBN has set up a biology lab in a radiochemistry lab – an incredibly rare feat in Australia as the two rarely co-exist.
At the centre of this fascinating research is Advancell’s alpha therapies.
“Existing beta radiotherapies in clinic cause DNA damage, but there's significant work that seems to suggest the alpha radiopharmaceuticals cause irreparable double stranded DNA breaks,” Dr Fletcher said.
“So if targeted to a cell, it should be damaging in a way that it can't recover from.
"The other aspect of this project is developing and screening novel TAT for melanoma, one of the top cancer killers in Queensland.”
Dr Fletcher's grant has been partially matched by The University of Queensland ($150,000), with equal funding ($150,000) and in-kind support from AdvanCell over the three years of the fellowship.
Dr Nick Fletcher is a member of the Thurecht Group and has partnered with the AIBN’s Dr Barbara Rolfe, an expert in immunology, to progress this research.
