How science could conquer cancer remission

Once you’ve gone through cancer treatment, the next battle is remission and making sure the cancer doesn’t return. This is an incredibly fearful time. What if we could ensure permanent death of a cancer cell, while we’re treating it?

A recent fellowship win for Dr Nicholas Fletcher and his team at the AIBN’s UQ Centre for Advanced Imaging is looking into these ‘holy grail’ treatments, with crucial input from their Industry Partner AdvanCell .

To fully investigate radiation therapy and cell death, the team have gone so far as to set up a biology lab in a radiochemistry lab – an incredibly rare feat in Australia as the two rarely co-exist. Here’s Dr Nick Fletcher to break it down.

“Targeted alpha therapies, or TATs, are extremely potent and have very localized delivery profiles. This means you can deliver this therapy to a tumour and cause localized cell death while limiting off-target damage to the rest of the body,” Dr Fletcher said.

“What we don't have a very good understanding of is the biological response around that, as in, how the body responds to the TAT and how the immune system responds to those dying cells in radiotherapy.

“There's some evidence that shows the immune system response is probably responsible for a lot of the actual therapy that we see, the hypothesis is that localised cell death can stimulate a broader immune response to cancer cells. This project is focused in part on finding markers for this response, identifying these would be a huge step forward in the field.

"The ideal outcome would be the ability to take a blood sample from a patient who's been given a TAT, look at how their immune system’s responding, and then use that to predict whether there’ll be a good or bad outcome, allowing tailoring of treatment regimens.

“That would be the holy grail.”

At the centre of this fascinating research is Advancell’s alpha therapies. Essentially, radiation therapy can damage or kill some cancer cells but there is a chance they can come back. Now, we have a chance to change that.

“Existing beta radiotherapies in clinic cause DNA damage, but there's significant work that seems to suggest the alpha radiopharmaceuticals cause irreparable double stranded DNA breaks,” Dr Fletcher said.

“So if targeted to a cell, it should be damaging in a way that it can't recover from.“The other aspect of this project is developing and screening novel TAT for melanoma, one of the top cancer killers in Queensland.”

The full grant of $360,000 has been partially matched by The University of Queensland ($150k), with equal funding ($150k) and in-kind support from AdvanCell over the 3 years of the fellowship. Dr Nick Fletcher has partnered with the AIBN’s Dr Barbara Rolfe , an expert in immunology, to progress this research.