A University of Queensland 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 were the most common type of head and neck cancers (comprising about 80 percent of all head and neck cancers).
Dr Saunders said these cancers were associated with a high mortality rate and a five-year survival rate of approximately only 60 percent.
“In addition, these tumours are also associated with a high annual recurrence rate, ” he said.
“Current therapies for head and neck cancers include surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. However, because of the high mortality rate associated with the traditional therapies there’s an obvious need for safer and more specific therapies to reduce the mortality.”
Dr Saunders’ research group has recently shown, in laboratory experiments, that inhibiting a protein known as E2F can inhibit cancer cell growth and reverse the cancer process.
Dr Saunders said “since E2F was needed for cancer cell growth, and was found abundantly in squamous cell carcinomas in patients, the development of inhibitors of E2F was a logical approach to treat this disease”.
“The development of E2F inhibitors promises to deliver a more specific and less toxic way of treating head and neck cancers. This type of therapy is completely novel and, if successful, would reduce the mortality and morbidity in patients” states Dr Saunders.
“I am most grateful for the Fellowship awarded by the Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation,” he said.
“This will allow us to conduct proof of principle experiments in animal models and in human patients. We also are examining methods of treatment delivery — whether gene-based therapy or drugs, but these advances could be five to 10 years away.
“Progress towards these goals has been greatly expedited by our close collaboration with Professor Bill Coman, UQ’s Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation Professor of Otolaryngology and chairman of Princess Alexandra Hospital’s Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) Department.”
Professor Coman said: “We are obviously concerned with patients’ surviving their cancer but also with maintaining their quality of life by improving functional outcomes such as; breathing, swallowing and talking. Our functional outcomes and survival rates are comparable with the best in the world.”
“We are always looking for better and simpler ways of treating cancer.”
Media: Further information, please contact Dr Nicholas Saunders, telephone 3240 5894, Holly Black at Princess Alexandra Hospital Public Relations, phone 07 3240 7899 or Jan King at UQ Communications, phone 0413 601 248.
Background Information
The Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation
The Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation awards are designed to promote, maintain and improve medical knowledge and education in Otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine) and the related surgical and paramedical fields.
Set up to honour the memory of her two husbands, Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams, the Foundation became operative following the death of Barbara Williams of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1991.
Garnett Passe was born in South Africa, the son of an Australian. At an early age he returned to Australia with his family to live in Melbourne. In 1926, he graduated in dentistry from the University of Melbourne, later travelling to the United Kingdom to study medicine.
He eventually specialised in otolaryngology, attaining considerable eminence particularly as a pioneer in the surgical treatment of deafness.
His career was interrupted by service with the Royal Navy in World War II but when he resumed practice in London at the end of the war, he quickly established himself as an outstanding otolaryngologist earning an international reputation before his untimely death from a heart attack in 1952, at the age of 48.
In 1968, Mrs Garnett Passe married retired New York stockbroker Rodney Williams and they made their home in Charleston, South Carolina. Mr Williams died in 1984, leaving a large part of his estate to his widow.
In 1986 Mrs Williams established a trust fund to honour the memory of both husbands “dedicated to the advancement in Australia and other countries of the Specialty of Otolaryngology and the related medical, surgical and paramedical fields”.
The Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams Memorial Foundation remains to this day one of the largest bequests ever made to Australian medicine.
