Peter Mac awarded $3 million to improve immunotherapy treatment response
25 November 2024
The Australian Cancer Research Fund (ACRF) has awarded Peter Mac $3 million to create the ACRF Centre for Cellular Imaging of Precision Immunotherapy to better determine which cancer patients will respond to immunotherapy.
This new initiative will harness cutting-edge imaging technologies to reveal the mechanisms behind immunotherapy’s successes and limitations, potentially unlocking the full potential of treatments in cancer care.
L:R Dr Nicolas Anthony, Associate Professor Jane Oliaro, Professor Belinda Parker, Professor Ilia Voskoboinik, Professor Shahneen Sandhu, Professor Joe Trapani
The Centre, led by Professors Belinda Parker and Ilia Voskoboinik, aims to discover why immunotherapy effectiveness vary between patients - from being potentially curative to having little therapeutic benefit.
The $3 million grant is one of two announced by ACRF, with a further $10 million committed to support Peter Mac’s work with GE HealthCare’s next generation total body PET/CT technology, providing a transformative boost to cancer research.
Professor Voskoboinik said that understanding mechanisms of response and resistance will allow clinicians to make better-informed treatment decisions and tailor therapeutic strategies to increase the proportion of patients who benefit from immunotherapy.
“Despite immunotherapy showing spectacular responses in some patients, we still do not fully understand why it fails to deliver a significant benefit to as many as 80 percent of those treated,” he said.
“As a result, immunotherapy is largely prescribed without any guarantee of success, at a great cost financially and often impacts the patient's health.”
Professor Parker explained that the inability to directly image and observe cellular mechanisms in action within human tissue – whether during successful treatment or in cases of resistant disease - presents a major challenge in our effort to model and understand the cellular mechanisms behind immunotherapy resistance.
“This ACRF grant will enable us to establish a world-class cancer imaging centre that will allow us to study how drugs affect patient-derived tissue models alongside real clinical response data. The goal is to develop personalised immunotherapy treatments that can benefit the wider cancer community,” she said.
“This unique, tightly integrated collaborative program will bring together tumour immunologists, clinicians leading international immunotherapy trials, and experts in biochemistry and cellular imaging under the same roof to advance precision immunotherapy and improve outcomes for cancer patients.”
“We are incredibly grateful to the ACRF for this opportunity and look forward to working with our fellow chief investigators and other scientists and clinicians to achieve better outcomes for people living with cancer,” Professor Parker said.
The Peter Mac team conducting this research includes Professor Sherene Loi, Professor Shahneen Sandhu, Professor Joe Trapani, Dr Clare Slaney, Associate Professor Paul Beavis, Professor Paul Neeson, Dr Elizabeth Christie, Dr Anna Trigos, Professor Tom John, Professor Grant McArthur, Associate Professor Jane Oliaro, and Professor Simon Harrison.