Melbourne on cutting edge of personalised cancer treatment

Jaala Pulford lost her daughter to a cancer that was never identified, but hopes new cutting edge research will give future patients a fighting chance.

Jaala Pulford and her daughter Sinead, who lost her short battle with cancer in 2014.

A cutting edge partnership combining artificial intelligence and mRNA genetic sequencing breakthroughs is poised to place Melbourne at the forefront of personalised medicine to save cancer and other patients.

US biotech company InterVenn Biosciences has announced a deal with mRNA Victoria to establish a commercial and research laboratory at St Vincent’s Hospital to develop the next generation of cancer detection.

The push to boost Melbourne’s personalised medicine capabilities is also a very personal crusade for Victorian Innovation Minister Jaala Pulford, whose own 13-year-old daughter Sinead died from a cancer which current technology was unable to even identify, let alone treat.

But under the collaboration with mRNA Victoria, InterVenn chief operating officer Erwin Estigarribia believes new tests will identify how well each patient will respond to available drugs, allowing future treatments for ovarian, pancreatic, liver, prostate and kidney cancers to be tailored to an individual’s specific disease so they have a greater chance of survival.

Jaala Pulford, with husband Jeff and son Hamish, lost daughter Sinead to a cancer that was never able to be identified. Picture: Sarah Matray

The massive computing capabilities provided by the InterVenn lab are needed to analyse the unprecedented level of data that can now be extracted from patients’ genetic samples, offering doctors a chance to instantly trawl through reams of RNA information for cancer-specific markers that can then be targeted by medications.

“It essentially reduces manual annotation from nine months down to less than nine seconds,” Mr Estigarribia said.

“There are about 25,000 genes in your body, there are more proteins in your body than stars in the sky – that number is 4,000,000,000,000,000 – or four quadrillion.

“The maths starts getting really scary and traditional computing just doesn't cut it, so we built a neural network that enables us to crunch that data in a super fast manner at a high degree of accuracy.

“It leapfrogs a lot of current technology that is already available here, and we want to make it available to all clinicians and researchers in Australia.”

The San Fransisco-based biotech will initially employ a dozen researchers at its Melbourne “dry” laboratory, but expects to quickly ramp up its operations as it has done in Malaysia and the Philippines, where more than 100 people now work.

It’s hoped in the future genetic sequencing will help identify and tailor treatments.

Ms Pulford is amazed by how far genomic testing has evolved since Sinead’s death in 2014.

As well as keeping Melbourne at the forefront of medical research, Ms Pulford said the partnership would see the next generation of treatments filter directly to Victorian patients.

“It’s incredibly important to me,” Ms Pulford said.

“I think about our experience. We had a little girl getting sicker and sicker and treatment that was weakening her. And that was really brutal.

“They all embarked on a series of tests to try and understand which cancer it was – working out which cancer is important because it then informs which treatment is going to work best.

“So they were looking and looking and looking and doing all these tests and trying to understand which it was and they were ruling out all sorts of different cancers. In the end, they couldn’t work out what the primary was.”

Ms Pulford said she had been amazed to see how far genomic testing had evolved since Sinead’s passing in 2014, fuelling hopes more can be done for any family placed in a similar situation.

“What’s exciting about genomics is all of the doors that it opens across all kinds of other research and, when we talk about individualised medicine and rare cancers, it’s really personal.

“It’s the idea that someone with cancer could have an early diagnosis and therefore better treatment and better outcomes or, on the other side of this coin, that a person with cancer would have their specific cancer traded, not their type of cancer.

“If I can help one scientist make one discovery that can relieve the distress of one family, then that would be a really good thing. But of course, we aim to do much more than that.”