The Valerie Enid Legge Project Grant: Testing personalised treatments for advanced bowel cancer
Australia has one of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the world. It is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer type in both men and women, and it’s predicted that over 17,500 Australians will develop bowel cancer in 2016.
Background
When bowel cancer is detected early, it is potentially curable, however less than 40% of bowel cancers are picked up in these early stages. Despite the progress being made in developing targeted therapies for other forms of cancer, effective treatments for advanced bowel cancer are still needed.
The research
It has been found that bowel cancer development is driven by a molecular network that helps the cancer cells to grow and survive. Professor Zhang and his team set out to explore whether this network could be targeted to block off the spread of advanced bowel cancer.
Professor Zhang has recently discovered that a key component of this molecular network is a protein called INPP4B. This protein is expressed at abnormally high levels in bowel cancer cells, and this drives the growth of the tumour. Over the past year, the team has been looking at how this protein could be targeted in bowel cancer treatment.
The impact
The team has now proved that blocking the INPP4B protein has the ability to slow down the growth of bowel cancer cells in the laboratory. This suggests that INPP4B-blocking is a promising strategy for the treatment of late-stage bowel cancer, which could improve treatment outcomes for all people affected by this disease. These findings also suggest that by inhibiting INPP4B, the overall benefits of some existing chemotherapy drugs could be enhanced.
Professor Zhang’s research is another step towards establishing effective, personalised treatments for people with cancer, where therapies are designed to target cancer at the molecular level and can be tailored to meet the needs of individual patients.