New hi-tech cancer research facility at SAHMRI to personalise cancer therapy

South Australia flagship medical research institute SAHMRI is set to receive $2.5 million for a new hi-tech research facility that will provide targeted and personalised cancer therapy.

Targeted and personalised cancer therapy for South Australians will flow from a new hi-tech research facility funded at SAHMRI.

The funding comes from the Australian Cancer Research Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation providing the equipment scientists need to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

The new $2.5 million Centre for Integrated Cancer Systems Biology will focus on five cancers: chronic myeloid leukaemia; acute lymphoblastic leukaemia; multiple myeloma; prostate cancer; and colorectal cancer.

But the facility will be available to every researcher in SA, studying any type of cancer, says University of Adelaide beat cancer Professor Tim Hughes at SAHMRI.

“This is very exciting new technology that's now available for all cancer researchers in Adelaide,” he said.

“It will make a difference to how we approach therapy for our patients.”

The facility allows scientists delve deeper into every individual cancer, to understand not only the mutations that caused the cancer in the first place, but also the changes that follow, enabling cancer cells to survive, prosper and evade detection by the body’s immune system.

The SAHMRI building in Adelaide. Picture: Supplied

“The protein abnormalities that occur in the cancer enable certain pathways to be activated and other pathways to be blocked. Understanding those pathways allows you to develop therapies that will be more effective,” Dr Hughes said.

“That's all part of precision medicine, which is the new direction for cancer therapy, to understand at a very detailed level the complexity of the cancer and understand its vulnerabilities, so you can actually exploit those in the clinic.”

What works for one patient will not necessarily work for another. And sometimes an effective drug will stop working as the cancer develops resistance, prompting clinicians to find an alternative approach.

Scientists can also learn a great deal from patient samples stored frozen in tissue banks. These vast repositories also contain information about clinical outcomes, so researchers can see what worked and what didn’t, understand what went wrong and find better treatments.

“One of the aims of precision medicine is that you don't over treat some patients or under treat other patients, you give them what they need according to their own particular cancer biology,” Dr Hughes said.