Vaccine vision
RMIT University’s Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski, project co-leader and SOLACE2 Translational Research Chair, said the multi-disciplinary research team would work towards the development of two types of vaccines to fight cancer. These would be personalised vaccines that can boost an individual’s immune response and vaccines to promote broad immunity.
“Innovation in vaccines boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic offers new pathways to deploy potential vaccines against non-traditional vaccine targets, such as cancer,” said Professor Plebanski, Head of the Cancer, Ageing and Vaccines Laboratory at the School of Health and Biomedical Sciences and Director for the Biomedical and Health Innovation Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT.
“We are grateful at the Cancer, Ageing and Vaccines Laboratory for this timely funding, which enables us to identify key targets for ovarian cancer vaccines.
“As well as identifying targets to help treat and prevent recurrence of existing cancers, our ultimate aim and motivation is to have vaccines that stop the cancer from taking root and spreading in the first place, which will help to prevent enormous suffering.”
Researchers will also work on new diagnostic and prognostic tests, including cancer and immune biomarkers, to precisely predict how well a patient will respond to PARPi/immunotherapy treatments.
The new project leverages WEHI’s extensive expertise in bioinformatics and analysis of genomics data, led by Principal Investigator Professor Tony Papenfuss.
The machine learning framework built for the project will also be relevant to other immunotherapy biomarker discovery projects, with the findings to be used for the development of treatments for other cancer types.