Bowel Cancer Australia recently announced a team led by Professor Michael Samuel as the successful applicant for a three-year $600k early-onset bowel cancer research project through the 2023 round of Cancer Australia’s Priority-driven Collaborative Cancer Research Scheme (PdCCRS).
According to Bowel Cancer Australia, bowel cancer in the under fifties is trending upward, with 1-in-9 new bowel cancer cases now occurring in people under age 50, and presentation with metastatic disease more frequent in this demographic. Rates in the over fifties have stabilised or are declining.
Rho-associated kinase or ROCK, is an enzyme (protein) found in everyone, and it controls the shape and movement of cells within the body.
The way in which cancer cells communicate with normal cells in their environment via ROCK has been discovered to drive disease progression (invasion, metastasis, and recurrence). This understanding has revealed that blocking cancers from hijacking normal cells in this way could be a new way to target the disease.
Professor Samuel of the Centre for Cancer Biology (an alliance between the University of South Australia and SA Pathology) and the Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health Research will investigate ROCK-induced early-onset bowel cancer progression.
“People diagnosed with early-onset bowel cancer have a 50% chance that their cancer will recur or spread to other organs following initial intervention (e.g. surgery to remove the primary cancer), compared to around 30% in people diagnosed with late-onset bowel cancer,” says Professor Samuel.
“We have evidence that ROCK activity in bowel cancers drives this process by influencing how cancers communicate with their environment. Our project will investigate how this happens. We will also study whether certain effects of ROCK activation in early-onset bowel cancers can help us predict whose cancers will recur and whose will not,” he continues.
“In a practical sense, this could help us use targeted therapies that block cancer cells from communicating with their environment, in people who are most likely to experience recurrence of their cancer. It could also help us minimise the use of debilitating chemotherapies,” he adds.
The research team, which includes clinicians from the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, will also be examining whether proteins that interact with ROCK cause early-onset bowel cancer progression, and if they do, targeting these proteins would be a way of stopping ROCK from accelerating tumour growth.
Source: Bowel Cancer Australia
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Sonia Marshall – South Western Sydney Local Health District
South Western Sydney Local Health District serves nearly 1 million people in a rapidly growing area of Sydney. Currently 250-300 families a week are moving into the region and with a growing population, the health district requires well executed strategy and delivery of healthcare to the population. Executive Director Sonia Marshall spoke with Australian Health Journal reporter Anne Dao at last week’s Australian Healthcare Week in Sydney, on supporting staff and the community. Sonia highlights the mission of delivering Safe Quality Healthcare at all times. In-time patient feedback is important and the SWSLHD has implemented a system called “My Experience Matters” to give near immediate response from patients on their level of care, whilst they are still on site at the hospital. The aim of the initiative is to quickly identify bad experiences that could be rectified.
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Understanding extracellular vesicles in cancer therapy research
Joy Wolfram is an Associate Professor at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia. Originally from Finland, she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology before transitioning to engineering with a PhD in nanotechnology completed in China. Wolfram has over a decade of experience working in hospitals in the United States before joining the University of Queensland.
Her research focuses on extracellular vesicles, which are crucial for cell communication both locally within tissues and over longer distances between organs. Her lab studies the roles of these vesicles in both health and disease, particularly in cancer. They investigate the harmful messages released by cancer cells that aid in tumour growth, specifically in breast cancer, while also exploring how to harness beneficial extracellular vesicles from healthy individuals as potential therapeutics.
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Job-ready clinical trial interns
The Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre Alliance, or VCCC Alliance for short, is a Victorian partnership of 10 research, academic and clinical institutions looking at improving cancer outcomes for patients.
The VCCC Alliance SKILLED clinical trial internships program is a pathway for scientists to build role-specific clinical trial knowledge, experience and in a clinical trials unit through theoretical and on-the-job training. The internship program is a 40 week intensive program to get science student interns job ready for clinical trial assistant and study coordinator internship roles.
