Community engagement
August 2023
Frazer Institute News
Hello everyone, this is the first edition of a newsletter to our committed consumers of the Frazer Institute. With the commencement of a Consumer Involvement Working Group in 2022, we successfully engaged with consumers with experience in different types of illnesses, and interest keeps growing. On behalf of the Frazer Institute, we would like to thank you wholeheartedly for your contributions, for sharing your stories with us, and for your active and continuing involvement in our research. Your contributions are essential to improving our research and to ensure it is clinically relevant.
In November 2022, the UQ Diamantina Institute was renamed to the Frazer Institute, to honour the extraordinary contributions that Prof Ian Frazer has made to cancer care and to celebrate his retirement. Professor Ian Frazer developed the world-first cancer vaccine, which prevents both cervical cancer and a type of head and neck cancer. You can read more about his achievements here in a story written to mark his retirement: UQ’s ‘Frazer Institute’ honours retiring vaccine co-inventor.
Below are updates of 3 of the many different and exciting research programs that are underway at the Frazer Institute. We hope you enjoy reading about them.
Update from the Frazer Institute Dermatology Research Centre
The UQ Frazer Institute hosts world-class melanoma research within its Dermatology Research Centre. Current research encompasses areas of prevention and early detection to reduce the impact of melanoma (ACEMID study). Professor Peter Soyer’s team uses total body imaging for the detection of changing or new moles. We are pleased to announce that a second total body imager run by UQ Frazer Institute Researchers is now active in Brisbane at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital Campus.
For those with an established diagnosis, the centre has a major project in clarifying the determinants of progression to identify those patients at risk of advancing disease. This program (M3P study) supported by Cancer Council Queensland uses the most advanced technology in genomic, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Finally, Frazer Institute researchers develop novel therapies for preventing the progression of melanoma. This includes the MELPROP trial that is in its final stages and will soon deliver its exciting findings on the targeting of cancer blood vessels to starve tumours.
The Frazer Institute also has a major focus on another type of skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma, which is extremely prevalent in those patients who have a compromised immune system. This is the case for organ transplant recipients who take medication to ensure their immune system does not reject their transplant. Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani’s team leads the TOSCANI cohort study evaluating the number of skin cancer developed by each organ transplant recipient is about to wrap up with nearly 250 participants. We are also pleased to announce a new clinical trial funded by the medical research future fund trying to prevent the onset of new skin cancers.
Our progress in osteosarcoma research
Osteosarcoma (OS) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in children and young adults. Patients experiencing metastatic, recurrent, or refractory sarcoma have a 5-year survival rate of approximately 20%. Alarmingly, there have been no significant therapeutic breakthroughs in 30 years for the treatment of these sarcomas. Therefore, there is a critical need for innovative therapeutic approaches, such as immunotherapy. One such promising immunotherapy is being pioneered by Associate Professor Fernando Guimaraes’ research group, who is working to take advantage of one of the white blood cells in the body, called Natural killer (NK) cells. These cells have ability to kill cancer cells. Dr Guimaraes’ group has discovered unique ways to supercharge this ability, allowing NK cells to seek out and kill sarcomas with ruthless efficiency.
Associate Professor Fernando Guimaraes’ research group is passionate about delivering consumer-driven research, and locally we regularly discuss research projects, ideas, and public outreach documentation with former sarcoma patients, facilitated by the UQ Frazer Institute Consumer Engagement program. Our consumers have contributed to defining research priorities and risk assessments, as well as reviewing, and providing meaningful input on our project proposals. They will further support us in disseminating lay summaries of our results at co-organised events with cancer-related organisations. We are also working collaboratively with consumers and clinicians to identify areas where clinical trials are needed and how best to implement trials to ensure maximum benefit to patients.
Head and neck cancer and immune suppression
The recent diagnosis of Aussie legend John Farnham with head and neck cancer has brought renewed awareness to this debilitating disease. Head and neck cancers are a diverse group of cancers that can affect different sites in the mouth and throat, and can be associated with different environmental and genetic factors. Cancer-causing human papillomaviruses (HPV) are related to a proportion of head and neck cancers, and their incidence has increased over the last decades. HPV also causes cervical cancer, for which the first-ever cancer vaccine was developed by Professor Ian Frazer. This vaccine was originally only offered to girls, however, it has since been recognised that HPV can also drive cancer in men, including head and neck cancer. Therefore, today, all children are offered the prophylactic HPV vaccine.
Surgical removal of head and neck cancers is often associated with long-term effects on basic life skills such as eating, swallowing and speaking. From our recent conversations with our head and neck cancer consumers it is apparent that there is a need for less invasive treatment options that preserve these essential functions. We have multiple research groups at the Frazer Institute that study head and neck cancer, with the aim of identifying new targets for therapies. Dr Janin Chandra's research team has discovered that the head and neck cancers have developed a mechanism that disables one of the key immune cells whose job is to detect and organise the killing of cancerous tissue. Her team is working on a novel therapy that restores the function of these immune cells, called Langerhans cells, allowing them to destroy the growing tumour. We will keep you informed how these experiments progress in future newsletters.
We hope you enjoyed our first newsletter. We look forward to continuing working with you, and thank you for your ongoing contributions to our work.