Childrens' cancer. The words no parent ever wants to hear.
Sadly, on average three Australian children die from cancer every week.
Whilst treatment of the most common cancer in children - acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) - now has a greatly improved prognosis in children, the same success has not been achieved for children with brain cancers.
Our goal is to discover new therapies - therapies that are more effective and less toxic - to fight the most aggressive cancers in babies and children.
We are the only paediatric-focused group within the Brain Cancer Discovery Collaborative (a national group of brain tumour researchers that spans four Australian states).
We are a member of the prestigious International Children's Oncology Group and we collaborate broadly with national and international experts in our fields with the common goal to get new treatments into the clinic.
What we will do
Project Childrens' Cancers is focused on:
- Testing existing drugs and new compounds to improve patient outcomes.
- Understanding the biology of individual cancers to identify weaknesses to target.
- Determining why apparently similar cancer cells from individual patients respond differently to treatment.
- Harnessing the power of the body's own immune system to fight cancer cells.
- Developing new treatments with industry partners to feed our drug development pipeline.
Key research over the next 3 - 5 years
- Innovative systems and personalised therapies: Our innovative systems for the continued discovery of new treatments for cancers in children will enable prioritisation of drugs for the clinical trials pipeline. We will be among the first to propose routine personalised therapies for patients with brain cancers.
- Focus on babies: We will systematically test drug combinations that are better suited to treat babies with ALL, in order to tailor therapy to each patient.
- Genetics research: How do genes affect cancer treatment? We will dissect the underlying genetic and epigenetic features in human brain cancers and leukaemia cells to understand why certain drug combinations are successful in cells from one patient, but not from another.
- Immune system research: Can we use our immune system to fight cancer cells? We will better understand how the immune system responds to metastatic melanoma and use this knowledge to inform new treatment strategies for melanoma and brain cancer.
- Therapy-resistance reasons: We will investigate the mechanisms underpinning therapy-resistance in a very aggressive carcinoma in children and adults.
Our research utilises cutting-edge technologies, innovative laboratory cancer models and our unique collection of cancer cell lines that allows us to perform high-throughput drug screening.
Who we work with
We work in partnership with patients, clinicians and families at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children.
The skills of our team members are diverse and include laboratory scientists from academia and industry, clinical oncologists and neurosurgeons. We collaborate with others who bring valuable expertise, including radiologists, medical physicists, pathologists, chemists, pharmacologists, and bioinformaticians.
Our research is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council, Cancer Australia, Cure Cancer Australia, Cancer Council WA and industry partners, along with a range of generous funders, including Children's Leukaemia and Cancer Research Foundation, The Telethon Adventurers, The Raine Foundation, Bright Blue, Ethan Davies Foundation, Cure Brain Cancer Foundation, and Brady Support Foundation.
Our local team
This collaborative project at the Telethon Kids Institute is headed by Professor Ursula Kees, Dr Nick Gottardo, Dr Raelene Endersby and Dr Jason Waithman.