Cancer Challenge
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A University researcher has been awarded $850,000 by one of Australia's largest private, charitable, medical foundations to develop ways to inhibit head and neck cancers, the fifth most common cancer worldwide.
The Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation has awarded a Fellowship to Associate Professor Nicholas Saunders, from UQ's Faculty of Health Sciences and Principal Research Fellow at UQ's Centre for Immunology and Cancer Research at Princess Alexandra Hospital.
Dr Saunders said squamous cell carcinomas comprised about 80 percent of all head and neck cancers.
The cancers were associated with a high mortality rate and had a five-year survival rate of only 60 percent, he said.
Dr Saunders' research group has recently shown that inhibiting a protein known as E2F can inhibit cancer cell growth and reverse the cancer process.
"The development of E2F inhibitors promises to deliver a more specific and less toxic way of treating head and neck cancers," he said.
"This type of therapy is completely novel and, if successful, would reduce the mortality and morbidity in patients."
Dr Saunders said the Fellowship would allow researchers to conduct proof of principle experiments on animal models and human patients.
