World-first melanoma research aimed at developing personalised radiation treatments for skin cancer patients is underway at Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital.
Lead researcher and radiation oncologist Professor Bryan Burmeister said each melanoma patient reacted differently to treatment.
“It’s called personalised medicine,” he said.
“We don’t classify patients according to what tumours they have, we now classify their treatments according to their genetic make-up of their tumour.”
The process involves removing cancerous cells from the patient and then identifying in the laboratory whether there are immune cells around particular melanoma cells.
Cells are then cultured in a Petri dish and exposed to smaller doses of radiation to see how they respond.
“Once we identify clones of cells we think might be sensitive to the radiation, we go further to see if we can identify individual biomarkers, which we can then test for in identifying radio sensitivity,” Professor Burmeister said.
“It’s like culturing a bacteria from a patient with an infection. You identify the bacteria, you expose it to antibiotics in the laboratory, [and] if the bacteria is sensitive to the antibiotics, you use those antibiotics on the patient.”
Professor Burmeister said while pharmaceutical companies had looked at the effects of drug therapy on melanoma patients, this type of research using radiation was a world first.
“I’ve been working with melanoma for over 25 years and it still amazes me how in some patients the disease just melts away and in others it just laughs at you and kills the patient within a few weeks or months,” he said.
“So there is an incredible variation in the behaviour of this disease in individual patients.”
‘Melanoma a diabolical disease’
Gordon Hughes, 68, from Mitchell in Queensland’s southern inland, has stage four melanoma and is part of the trial.
“You live out in the bush, you don’t know what you’ve got,” he said.
“You go to the local doctor, he’s not sure. He shuffles you on to someone where they’re sure and that’s how I ended up here.”
Mr Hughes was diagnosed in June last year, but was unruffled about the treatment.
“It’s one of those things that happen. You’ve just got to go with the flow, don’t you,” he said.
“Can’t do anything about it until these fellas get hold of it and rip it into it.”
Skin cancers account for around 80 per cent of all newly diagnosed cancers in Australia.
According to the latest Queensland Cancer Registry, figures show melanoma is still the most common cancer diagnosed in males under 35.
Between 95 and 99 per cent of skin cancers are caused by exposure to the sun.
Acting Health Minister Dr Anthony Lynham said the high sun exposure in Queensland meant a very high prevalence of melanoma.
“Melanoma is a diabolical disease,” he said.
“So this groundbreaking research to determine essentially whether patients can be treated with radiation is extremely, extremely important to us.”