ONJ Cancer Research Institute announces cancer breakthrough

The Melbourne institute the late entertainer helped to build has announced promising findings that could help pancreatic cancer patients.

In news that would make the late Olivia Newton-John’s heart sing, a team at the ONJ Cancer Research Institute in Melbourne, which she helped to build, has announced a breakthrough in a potential treatment of deadly pancreatic cancer.

While still in its early stages and yet to undergo human clinical trials the research, published on Wednesday in the journal Cell Reports, suggests a novel drug target that can improve the response of pancreatic tumours to immunotherapy.

This is urgently needed as pancreatic cancer is almost completely unresponsive to existing immunotherapy, which is a powerful treatment for cancer that helps treat disease by reactivating the immune system to allow it to recognise and remove cancer cells.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive types of cancer and difficult to diagnose early as there are few symptoms.

Newton-John at the Institute’s opening. Picture: Nathan Dyer

The breakthrough could help with the treatment of pancreatic cancer.

It also has very low survival rates – only 11 per cent of patients are alive five years after their initial diagnosis. About 4260 new cases are diagnosed each year in Australia.

The researchers reported the results of the study provided “strong rationale” for further development.

The study was led by Professor Matthias Ernst, director of the ONJ Cancer Research Institute and Head of La Trobe’s School of Cancer Medicine. He cautioned that it was likely to take several years before the current research could reach clinical applications, but that the Institute was uniquely placed to accelerate these findings towards future clinical trials.

“Because we work in the same building as our oncologist colleagues at Austin Health, our discoveries in the laboratory can be quickly translated into patient trials,” Prof Ernst said.

He said the research showed that inhibition of haematopoietic cell kinase (HCK), a protein found in a type of immune cell, improved the response of pancreatic cancer to immunotherapy in preclinical models. He said it also showed it reduced the spread of cancer cells to other areas of the body – a process known as metastasis.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow co lead Dr Ashleigh Poh from the Institute is also part of the research team and said this was an important breakthrough because most pancreatic cancer patients do not respond to existing anti-cancer drugs.

“The survival rate of pancreatic cancer has not improved over the past few decades,” she said. “We hope to eventually translate these findings into the clinic and improve survival outcomes for pancreatic cancer patients.”