With advancement in diagnosis, risk-stratification and treatment protocols, the outcomes for cancer have improved worldwide. An example of this is childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia where survival is nearly 85% with modern risk-stratified, response-based treatment protocols. However, a proportion of these patients are either refractory to therapy or have persistent detectable disease after 2 blocks of chemotherapy.
Our group is dedicated to developing solutions for these very high-risk cancers. The heterogeneity of human cancer has led to the realization that personalized approaches are needed to improve outcomes, especially in very high-risk patients. Precision oncology has traditionally used static features like expression of key targets or mutations to identify therapeutic targets. Although a small proportion of individuals derive clinical benefit from the static approach, functional precision medicine provides dynamic information regarding cancer vulnerabilities. Functional precision medicine is a strategy whereby live cancer cells from patients are directly perturbed with compounds to provide immediately translatable, personalized information to guide therapy. We use this approach to inform therapy for these patients, understand chemo-resistance and identify novel agents for treatment of these otherwise difficult-to-treat malignancies.
Active Projects:
- 1. High throughput drug response profiling for very high-risk haematological malignancies.
- 2. Exploiting metabolic vulnerabilities of chemo-resistant cancers
- 3. Characterisation, isolation and targeting of the rare dormant refractory cancer cells
- 4. Developing machine learning based image analysis solutions for phenotypic characterisation of tumours and its multi-omic correlation.