Victorian Cancer Agency awards $400,000 fellowship to ovarian specialist

This year’s $400,000 Victorian Cancer Agency (VCA) Clinical Fellowship has been awarded to Dr Clare Scott from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) to help advance her work on epithelial ovarian cancer.

An especially lethal form of the disease, epithelial ovarian cancer is found in the cell lining (epithelium) of the ovary, accounting for some 90 per cent of ovarian tumours.

But its processes remain largely a mystery, with recent research suggesting that it may begin in cells outside of the ovary.

“In addition to working out where ovarian cancer starts, we need more precise ways of studying human ovarian cancers in the laboratory and, with the VCA funding, we will work on improving those laboratory models,” said Dr Scott, who is a laboratory head at the WEHI's Stem Cells and Cancer and Molecular Genetics of Cancer divisions and a medical oncologist at The Royal Melbourne Hospital.

“Because ovarian cancer becomes resistant to current therapies so often, it is essential that we discover new treatments. Being able to accurately study human ovarian cancers in animal models provides great advantages in this regard.”

Dr Scott said that the part of the VCA funding would go towards developing better pre-clinical models for ovarian cancer than those currently available for testing new drugs.

According to the WEHI, ovarian cancer is the sixth major cause of cancer deaths in Australian women, with around two thirds of the 1200 women diagnosed with the disease each year dying from it.

And although considerable effort has gone into developing better screening tools, about 80 per cent of women diagnosed with epithelial ovarian cancer receive their diagnosis after it has spread beyond the ovary, with some 70 percent of cases deemed incurable.

An important tool assisting Dr Scott with her research into rare ovarian cancers is CART-WHEEL.org, which is a web portal for coordinating patient information, research studies and clinical trials for rare cancers. Dr Scott is the principal investigator in the program, which also receives funding from the Victorian Cancer Agency.

“The website provides a new way of linking patients into the system of research and clinical trials,” Dr Scott said. “This increases the number of patients available for specialised research, with the ultimate goal of gathering enough entries over time to make clinical trials for different types of rare tumours a possibility.”