Researcher is excited about cancer fight

Combination therapies and drug repurposing have been described as two major development areas for the future treatment of cancer.

Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research director Professor Peter Leedman highlighted these as important areas during a community presentation in Bunbury on Monday night.

“Every time I talk to the community is a wonderful opportunity to educate and inspire people about medical research,” Professor Leedman said.

“Things change so fast in medical research, and technology is advancing so quickly that it’s hard to predict where we could be in even five years.”

He believed targeted combination therapies would become more common “in the next few years” and also said the use of old drugs such as thalidomide and colchicine were being repurposed to help with cancer treatment.

Professor Leedman described technology as having a major impact on improving cancer research in a number of ways.

He believed an increasing ability to build a “library” of tumours would enable researchers to better understand cancers.

The need to handle “big data” would also create computer-based jobs into the future.

He also described a number of companies’ attempts to design microscopic organs on microchips as being something which could shorten the time required to test possible treatments before they could ultimately be used.

“One of the biggest issues is predicting the side-effects. Often we can’t tell these until drugs are in a patient,” Professor Leedman said.

“The creation of microscopic organs on chips means we can run the drug on a chip and hopefully this might shorten the window of drug development.”

Professor Leedman also spoke about the work conducted by the Perth-based institute.

He said the institute had a strong community focus with an education program and it regularly hosted school students with the aim of inspiring the next generation of scientists.