In Australia, lymphomas are:
- The most common cancer in people aged 15-29 years
- The third most common cancer in children aged 0-14 years
- The sixth most common cancer in adults.
The incidence of lymphomas in Australia has increased over the past 20 years and is continuing to trend upwards, which is why more research is desperately needed to bring hope to people fighting lymphomas.
Lymphoma Support
Aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma (aNHL) can lead to poor outcomes for patients, in particular those who don’t respond well to treatment or experience a relapse.
Professor Stuart Pitson and his team are developing an advanced, more targeted treatment focussing on a specific enzyme which he hopes will lead to a new treatment for aNHL.
Up to 40% of patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) will relapse or experience significant side effects following current therapies, highlighting the urgent need for better, more targeted treatments.
This project will enable Dr Giles Best to continue preliminary studies into a drug that has shown to kill DLBCL cells, which could potentially lead to a new treatment and save more lives.
An emerging new treatment for blood cancers is called CAR T-cell therapy, where a patient’s own cancer-fighting immune cells (T-cells) are genetically engineered in a lab to create ‘supercharged’ CAR T-cells, which are then returned to the patient to better recognise and attack the cancer.
To make this treatment even better and save more lives, we need to understand how it affects the immune cells over time. This project led by Dr Collin Chin will use a technology called ‘flow cytometry’ to study the impact on individual blood cells, and ultimately improve this treatment for patients.
