As a clinician and researcher, Professor Nick Gottardo has focused his career on developing new treatments for childhood brain cancer. Now working alongside his team at The Kids Research Institute Australia, Professor Gottardo is committed to finding new drugs that reduce side effects and improve treatments for children with brain cancer.
We spoke with Professor Gottardo about his research, and how through global collaboration, these drugs will soon be used in clinical trials with the aim of helping children with brain cancer all around the world.
Can you tell us what your research is about?
Our research is focused on finding more effective and kinder treatments for children with brain cancer, with a large focus on looking for ways to make existing treatments work better. By doing this, we hope to reduce the amount of therapy needed to treat the cancer and, in turn, minimise the negative side effects for children.
What stage are you currently at with your research project?
We've found several new drugs that we believe are close to being ready for clinical trials. These drugs help to stop the natural ability of cancer cells to repair themselves and continue growing.
Radiation and certain chemotherapies work by damaging the DNA of cancer cells, making the cancer cells unable to copy themselves and divide resulting in cell death. However, cancer cells can often repair the damage caused by radiation and chemotherapy, allowing them to recover and continue growing.
We're investigating drugs that work by stopping cancer cells from repairing the DNA damage themselves. We've tested a lot of these drugs, both individually and in combination with radiation therapy and chemotherapy, and have now found a few that appear particularly promising. We're currently running studies to confirm these findings before starting clinical trials.
What are the biggest scientific or clinical challenges in understanding or treating childhood brain cancer today?
One of the biggest challenges is having enough patients to run the trials, in order to prove new treatments are effective, it requires national and international collaboration as part of clinical trial cooperative groups and we are so committed to achieving this to overcome the challenge.
In the lab, the challenge is finding new treatments that can eventually be used in hospitals for patients. Developing and testing a new therapy can take a long time, often a decade, although improved systems mean that we can now achieve this in about five years.
Collaboration has always been essential to our work, and to overcoming these challenges. We've partnered closely with research teams around the world from the very beginning, because this is not something that can be done alone.
How do you see this research impacting children with brain cancer?
The beauty of collaboration is that discoveries made in Perth can help children both here and all around the world. I recently led and completed a dose reduction clinical trial for one of the less common types of medulloblastoma through the Children's Oncology Group (COG), the world's largest cooperative group devoted exclusively to paediatric cancer research which conducts clinical trials for children and adolescents with cancer. The trial was open at about 180 hospitals across the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and some other countries, revealing the power of international collaboration
We are a global community. I'm on calls several times a week with researchers from all over the world, all working together to solve this puzzle. It's heartwarming to know that our work can help not only the children we treat directly, but also many others around the world.
Why did you choose to go into cancer research?
When I was a junior doctor, I wanted to work as a paediatrician and care for children. During a rotation working with children who have cancer, I quickly realised that this was where I wanted to dedicate my career. I loved working with the children and their families to help them as best I could.
What would you like to say to our donors?
I don't think it's widely recognised how critical this funding is, because research results often aren't seen for many years. But this support enables us to work together as a team to find solutions to very difficult problems.
To the donors, if you didn't support us, we simply couldn't do this work. Your funding is transformative. Organisations like Cancer Council WA, which are deeply committed to funding cancer treatment and research, form the backbone of what we do. We wouldn't have achieved any of this without donor support.
