Science in the blood: L’Oreal Fellowship awarded to WEHI’s Kylie Mason

As a teenager Kylie Mason survived leukaemia, an experience that sparked her interest in science and medicine, with a special focus on understanding blood cancers and how to reduce the side-effects of new chemotherapy treatments.

As a result of her scientific endeavours, Mason is one of three Australian scientists to receive a L’Oreal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships, awarded in a ceremony in Melbourne tonight.

Mason is based at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and is a clinical haematologist at The Royal Melbourne Hospital. Her research has centred on blood platelets and their role in blood cancers such as leukaemia.

In 2006 Mason was part of a WEHI team that was evaluating a new class of anti-cancer agents, BH3-mimetics, specifically ABT-737, developed by Abbott Laboratories.

ABT-737 targets pro-survival proteins that keep cancer cells living long after they should have undergone natural cell death. The drug had a lot of potential, but it also had its limitations.

The WEHI team found that ABT-737 ceased being effective in the presence of protein Mcl-1, which was conveniently being produced by many tumour cells. This suggested that treating cancer with ABT-737 alone would not be sufficient to defeat it. Instead, combination therapies might be a better approach.

Mason then went on to perform studies in mice using ABT-737 along with low doses of other chemotherapy drugs and found the approach had tremendous potential to combat leukaemia.

It was in conducting this research that Mason began to gain insight into the role that blood platelets play in cancer, and into the lifecycle of platelets.

ABT-737 tends to cause acute thrombocytopenia (low platelet count) as a side-effect, but while it is toxic to circulating platelets, it didn’t appear to affect their production in bone marrow.

In collaboration with Dr Ben Kile, Mason showed that platelets are programmed to die, containing a molecular ‘clock’ that dictates their lifespan.

“This work has profound implications for the diagnosis and treatment of disorders that affect platelets,” she said. “It also has critical implications for improved blood bank storage of platelets. The possibility of manipulating platelets to enhance their life span and increase storage life could revolutionise platelet transfusion therapy.”

In 2009 Mason was awarded the prestigious Victorian Premier’s Award for Public Health and Medical Research, and in 2010 she received a $400,000 VCA Clinical Research Fellowship to maximise the potential of BH3 mimetic drugs.

The other two L’Oreal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships went to Dr Suetonia Palmer, from University of Otago, New Zealand, for her work in improving kidney disease treatment, and Dr Baohua Jia, from Swinburne University of Technology, for producing more efficient solar cells.