Unconventional research drives innovation in curing childhood cancer

The Balnaves Foundation’s Young Researcher of the Year Awards have reached their fifth year, enabling young researchers to pursue innovative ideas in the quest for a cure for childhood cancer.

As Professor Michelle Haber AM, Executive Director of Children’s Cancer Institute Australia (CCIA), says: “It is becoming increasingly difficult for young researchers to make a mark for themselves. Our grant funding bodies generally do not provide sufficient funding for early research career stages. What is perhaps even more concerning, they have become highly conservative on what type of research is being supported. This situation creates a real problem in our innovation system as it underutilises the creative potential of so many passionate and highly skilled young people.”

The Balnaves Foundation grants have given an opportunity to a growing cohort of young researchers from diverse academic backgrounds and scientific disciplines to explore their ideas and apply new approaches to unravelling the complex underpinnings of childhood cancer - still the leading cause of death from disease for children in Australia.

Recipients within this program are undertaking pioneering work at the cutting edge of medical science and are making groundbreaking contributions to a broad range of fields, including research into cancer stem cells and genetic drivers of childhood leukaemia.

This year’s recipients, Dr Sharon Sagnella and Dr Siba Dolai, are investigating unconventional areas of childhood cancer research at CCIA, offering the potential of new and better capabilities for future childhood cancer treatment.

Dr Sagnella, a biomedical engineer, combines chemistry, biology and nanotechnology with the aim of improving survival rates for children with cancer by enhancing the effectiveness of current chemotherapy while eliminating its toxic side effects.

“I aim to design a nanocarrier system that can deliver chemotherapy specifically to neuroblastoma cells, a childhood cancer which is extremely aggressive,” said Dr Sagnella. “My ultimate aim is to treat neuroblastoma with optimum efficacy via the delivery of drugs in these nanocarriers directly to a tumour site and eliminate the toxicity of treatment to avoid the devastating side effects.”

Using proteomics techniques, Dr Dolai will delve deeper into investigating the effectiveness of anticancer treatment, looking at the specific reactions a drug causes in the body. His project aims to develop a novel drug evaluation platform that will quantify the effects of chemotherapy on cancer cell signalling pathways; the complex lines of communication within cells which are defective in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), causing a patient to relapse and driving the cancer’s resistance to standard treatment.

“There are cell signalling pathways that can mutate in ALL cells and are either ‘switched on’ or ‘switched off’ when they shouldn’t be, resulting in the abnormal cell growth that drives the disease,” said Dr Dolai.

“My goal is to develop a platform that can identify the pathways that are going wrong in ALL, so that treatment strategies can be tailored to individual relapsed patients and return the defective pathways to normal, thereby giving relapsed ALL patients hope of a better outcome.”

“This program has been a resounding success, with past awardees going on to achieve impressive external grant funding to establish their independent research projects,” Professor Haber said.

Previous recipients of the Balnaves Foundation’s Young Researcher of the Year Awards have gone on to receive prestigious Cancer Institute NSW Fellowships, Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowships, Young Tall Poppy of the Year Awards and Cure Cancer Australia Grants.