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Melanoma is one of the most common cancers in Australia,
1500 people a year die from melanoma in Australia.
And we have the highest rates of melanoma in the world.
We've gone from understanding quite a lot
about what goes wrong in a cell to make it into a melanoma.
But not being able to utilise
that for treatments for patients.
We've been able to turn that knowledge
which is moved very fast now
into some remarkable new treatments
that can kill melanoma cells.
As a genetic counsellor, I often use the analogy
of a gene being like a chapter in a book
and sometimes there's a typo in there
and those genes are arranged into chromosomes.
Sort of like the volumes of encyclopaedia.
And I guess what the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance is a
little bit doing like the work
that is happening within the alliance.
In some ways is more like the work of a librarian
where we are stocking the shelves, trying to make sure
that when people come into the library, the clinicians come in.
They're able to select the volume that they need
and find the information they need
to then go away and use that.
And what we're trying to do is have a well curated library
that clinicians can find that information easily on as many
of their patients as will benefit as possible.
So that approach is a beautiful mix with my interest.
Which is to find these genes, these key drivers
that make cancer cells grow and then be able to target them.
So bringing together the efforts of genomics
where one understands all the genes
that go wrong within a cancer.
And then working at how to treat it is something in which Claire
and I are very much working on.
So I discovered that I had cancer
from a small lump under my armpit.
Began to grow and it began to grow very, very rapidly.
So when we started to come up with the idea
of targeting one gene, the BRAF oncogene for treating melanoma,
this was an international effort.
And one of my colleagues
in Los Angeles had been treating the young man, Chris Gordon
from New Zealand with an immune treatment.
And unfortunately, this didn't help Chris.
And my colleague in Los Angeles, Tony Raybass, who I was working
on developing these new ideas
for targeting the BRAF oncogene said to Chris, why don't you go
and see Grant in Melbourne?
We have this new treatment emerging
that you might be interested in.
So Chris came across from Auckland to Melbourne.
Where we had this very inivative new trial
to target the BRAF oncogene.
Grant McCather had pulled me aside
and said I've got something I would like to show you.
And he hadn't said anything else
about how the drug would be working to that point.
Pulled me into his office and showed me a scan
that I'd had the first scan
and then the new scan two weeks later.
And then the first scan he showed me I had a tumour
probably about that big, I guess,
about the size of an orange.
And then two weeks later, he showed me the same tumour
that had really shrunk to sort of from memory, about this big.
And that was in two weeks, so it was absolutely incredible.
And now over six years ago, Chris started treatment
for advanced melanoma that we consider incurable.
He started on the BRAF inhibitor,
and had a dramatic response, the disease is continued
under complete control.
We've moved in recent years from a genetic era looking
at one gene at a time to the genomic era where it's possible
to look at every gene in the genome.
Or subset of those genes that are known
to cause genetic conditions.
General practitioners are going to become major players
in personalised healthcare.
This is why it's very important at universities
that we build these cross disciplinary teams
between leading scientists and general practitioners
at the coal face of healthcare.
And that's something that you can do at a university.
At the end of the day, we don't want any patient left behind.
We want every patient really in the world to get the advantage
of the research that's happening here
at the University of Melbourne.
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