Cancer, Ageing and Vaccines Research Group

by professor vesper and we'll rejoin after their presentations for some questions so thank you so much for that introduction and thank you for the opportunity to to be here and be able to talk to you about what motivates us to go to work every day whether it'll be physically or remotely

so what what we do at the cancer rating and vaccines lab is to focus on providing solutions we hope uh for major diseases and a disease we're particularly interested in is ovarian cancer again that is a highly lethal disease with a low survival rate but with that we can flip those statistics if we can actually help in early detection so whether late detection survival at stage 4 is only 10 if detected early it can be over 90

the diagnostics at the moment are very vague there are no early stage diagnostics even if detected first line treatment often is followed by the development of drug resistance and after drug resistance develops there are very few options for treatment we're trying to understand the individual as a whole to be able to improve diagnostics and personalized treatment across disciplines and particularly we are not just cancer biologists we also work as immunologists and the inclusion of immunology into this new field this cross-discipline that alex was was telling about has brought us some excellent outcomes in terms of being able to help at this initial stages particularly for diagnostics development

at the moment the the diagnostics are a couple of cancer proteins in blood plus an mri scan but recently we found by doing immunological tests that we can predict and diagnose ovarian cancer with the same accuracy if we substitute a particular marker for immune cells in blood so it can substitute for an mri we were very excited um by this and surprised by how um how much this was taken out but something um it had 173 million hits when it went out public in the media and we believe that the reason is that this this is an emphasis on translation and being able to find things in blood that then can be used even in remote areas um so it it really brings that practicality also to to the detection of biomarkers

um we also found um at the early stages at the moment accuracy is really not very good it's fifty percent uh at the late stages it's ninety percent but uh what we have found uh is that if we add um some novel immune markers and um complex epigenetic biomarkers in blood the company a combination of just two markers which is quite extraordinary can give us up to 90 percent accuracy for early stages and this is the research we are doing right now and applying for funding and keeping going with it but very excited that this multidisciplinary inclusion of of markers is is already giving us some very exciting pointers

all of this is from a drop of blood

so the dream really is that uh rather than go to the hospital with vague symptoms um one could just do an analysis of the gp clinic

and down the line we're actually collaborating with uh the micro nano research facility at engineering within the college of stem as well to develop practical sensors so down the line we are developing devices that could even be read at home uh on your on a phone on a smartphone from a drop of blood and this um this stream of development this practicality also means we could not just help detection we could also help personalize the treatment free therapy so if somebody is detected help them select which drugs they're going to be giving because at the moment there is no choice you just get given one drug uh well combination of drugs um carboplatin and paclitaxel and surgery but that's the option um and like i mentioned before um platinum resistant disease which is diagnosed about 12 months after this um after treatment um has very high mortality so you have been potentially on the incorrect drug for 12 months so if we could diagnose pre-therapy which drug you should be given

we have actually done a similar analysis of different immune markers so we test hundreds of markers and we actually found two across human trials that are predicting platinum resistance before treatment so that is pretty much 12 months before diagnosis and again this is this is active research that we're doing right now and um we were also thinking um if um if somebody is told well there's no point you're going onto standard first line therapy it's unlikely to work for you what can we offer so we have been testing other drugs one is called cyclophosphamide and we have to be able to find a marker that actually a biomarker in blood an immune biomarker in blood that can predict response to treatment as well so again the dream would be if we have a patient coming in from a drop of blood we can say okay you go into standard therapy or you go into other therapy so hopefully that that really maximizes the chances of of the patients not having a recurrence and and that particular treatment that was given to them being effective nevertheless if some people do develop a recurrence

then we're also working to help develop new drugs to kill drug resistant cancers and we actually just have been awarded

a new new drug grant together with collaborators and industry in in india to really progress some therapeutics for platinum resistant disease so that then we really are hitting at at every stage of of this process maximizing chances of survival so um in our laboratory we we go as you can see all the way from um focusing on practical early detection personalized therapy and innovating in your treatments

but we could avoid all that if we already had an effective immune system that is actually preventing the cancer from happening in the first place and you may or may not know that our immune system is monitoring our body all the time right now as we're sitting here for emergence of any any cancers not letting them get a hold so if we have um ovarian cancer vaccines for that we're also engaging across disciplines and for a long time now we have been developing nanoparticle nanoparticle-based vaccines with a focus on ovarian cancer

so in terms of using the immune system and treating the patient as an individual we have been so successful we believe because rather than trying to detect the cancer itself um which in in my imagery here is a black hole we've been looking at the distortion that this black hole creates around it here space in our case the immune system and

our ovarian cancer patients however we know are postmenopausal or older females in their majority and um they they really the the diagnosis and the prospects of diagnosis carry a level of trauma and that will impact their immune system the immune system of all their individuals as we now are all aware because of covet as well as the immune system of males versus females and the immune system under psychological trauma changes we therefore need to understand on a basic level as well on a fundamental level the immune system of older adults and the immune system of individuals that have psychological trauma some of the work that we have been doing funded by the nhmrc we've run a human clinical trial on something called complex trauma disorder and mapped how the immune system changes upon psychological trauma and it does importantly at the moment we're running a logical human trial

comparing vaccines in young and old individuals funded boys by nhmrc and the crippled craig foundation in tasmania

and this large-scale human trial of 300 individuals is comparing old and young immune systems male and female and all across a large number of individuals and asking two questions why does the immune system of older individuals respond differently to vaccines and secondly is it okay to combine vaccines together or sequentially and and the answers are not obvious and the very important answers for policy for immunization and to keep populations safe now to address these questions we're not just looking at the antigen specific response so not just against the response for to flu induced by a flu vaccine but we're also looking how vaccination can change the whole immune system if if we go back to that image of the black holes how the whole system changes to understand how the whole system changes and then it's able to respond to vaccines or is able to respond to cancers or is a or is altered so our detection of cancer markers may have to be different we're doing big data systems approaches so i've just listed some of these you don't need to read through that but just we are doing absolutely everything to map to truly map an individual from a molecular basis from their protein cells dna changes in their dna which allow it to be expressed or not and even their microbiome to really understand these individuals who generates ridiculous amounts of data which is why being at rmit is very exciting because we have this whole push for artificial intelligence analysis and digital innovation and big data analysis with which we can construct these patterns of immunity that will help us to personalize medicine so i do i am excited to hear our next speaker karen vesper myself just before i finish up just one thing to mention uh to follow up from alex across the across the disciplines that rmit is is really exciting place to be at the moment with the college of state of stem ramping up interdisciplinary innovation and particularly in areas of of digital there are also other constructs and i'm a director of one which is called biomedical and health innovation they're called enabling capability platforms and they they provide again um links between different disciplines between different researchers to in line with this vision to build interdisciplinary and translational strengths

and as alex mentioned they are at the creation of hubs and centers and we we work together and um we are we are there really to support the hubs and centers attracting and encouraging the best and brightest across the disciplines so now i'm going to leave you to karen which will tell you more about this big data that she's going to provide tools for so i can finally analyze all this data that we've been generating over to you