Researchers convert NRF seed funding into more than 1.6 million for SA brain tumour research support

Congratulations to Professor Stuart Pitson, Dr Briony Gliddon and Dr Mel Tea from the University of South Australia Centre for Cancer Biology and Prof Ben Thierry also from UniSA who have been successfully awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council - NHMRC Ideas Grant to progress their research on new approaches to enhance immunotherapy and imaging for brain tumours!

Immunotherapy, where the patient's own immune cells are genetically supercharged in the lab to find and destroy cancer cells, has shown striking outcomes in a number of cancers in recent years, but to date has failed to show the same benefit as a therapy for glioblastoma brain tumours.

NRF Director of Brain Tumour Research and Chief Investigator on the project Prof Stuart Pitson explains: “Immunotherapy offers great promise for brain tumour therapy, but is currently limited due to brain tumour-induced immunosuppression. This proposal aims to overcome this problem to improve the potency of brain tumour immunotherapies. Successful outcomes in this work have the potential to dramatically improve the survival outcomes for glioblastoma patients.”

Preliminary research for this grant application was supported by NRF seed funding, made possible thanks to your generous donations. The three year $844,150 NHMRC Ideas Grant will now enable the team to continue this great work. Only the top 10.5% of grant applications were funded in this round so we are extremely proud of the team for their success in such a competitive environment, and their dedication to advancing brain tumour research.

Stuart's team initial NRF seed grant $43,000 - Gliddon B, Pitson S, Brown M and Tea Improving CAR-T cell trafficking to brain tumours

Title: New approaches to enhance immunotherapy for brain tumours

Details: Primary brain tumours and brain metastases arising from other tumours both have extremely poor patient outcomes. Immunotherapy offers great promise for brain tumour therapy, but is currently limited due to brain tumour-induced immunosuppression. This proposal aims to overcome this problem to improve the potency of brain tumour immunotherapies. Successful outcomes in this work have the potential to dramatically improve the survival outcomes for glioblastoma patients.

NHMRC Ideas Grant $844,149

Pro Ben Thierry NRF seed grant $25,000 - Towards Better Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Brain Tumours

Title: Preclinical Validation of a Targeted Theranostic Agent for MRI Guided Radiotherapy and Radiosensitisation of Aggressive Brain Tumours

Details: This project aims to validate preclinically FerroTrace-FAPi, a theranostic agent designed to improve and facilitate image guided radiotherapy. Successful outcomes would enable and improve aggressive image-guided treatment of brain tumours with acceptable neurological toxicity, including in the near future with proton beam radiotherapy. It would also pave the way to rapid commercialisation of FerroTrace-FAPi via the FDA orphan-drug designation pathway.

NHMRC Development Grant $837,678