Lumen Summer 2018 - Flipbook - Page 19
With the success of the Adelaide clinic, and
multiple sites in Australia, the next step is to roll
the program out internationally before securing
funding for large-scale patient studies.
“Seeing the outcomes for patients - the impact
on their personal lives, how they’ve gained
control over a disease that previously stopped
them doing things, and how they’ve moved
forward in such positive ways - that’s the most
fulfilling part of the research and our group’s
motivation to do more,” he said.
BELOW
Nobel Laureate
Howard Florey
can provide the right treatment to the right
patient at the right time.
“Men would like to know what the risk of their
cancer eventually spreading or becoming more
aggressive is, so they can make better treatment
choices when they are diagnosed.
“If men are low risk, they may be better off
not having treatment and monitoring the
cancer because the side effects are severe,”
she said.
Lisa’s research is focused on developing new
medical tests to establish the aggressiveness of
a tumour and accurately distinguish between
those requiring treatment and tumours that
simply need monitoring.
“We are developing tests that will look at the
blood or the tumour itself and give us more
information about how that cancer is going to
progress based on the types of lipids that are in
the tissue in the blood,” she said.
Lifestyle factors also play a role in how a cancer
might behave, according to Lisa.
“Lipids are not only affected by your genes, but
also the environment. Diet, activity level and
obesity are all potentially going to affect the
lipids in your body and in turn can affect the
cancer,” she said.
With a major international program collecting
data on ‘lipid signatures’ underway, Lisa hopes
the research will soon be used in a clinical
setting and translate to more targeted therapies
treating prostate cancer.
Defining future cancer treatments
New prostate cancer diagnostic techniques
could spare thousands of men traumatic side
effects from unnecessary aggressive and
invasive treatment, thanks to Professor Lisa
Butler and her team.
With more than 18,000 men diagnosed in
Australia every year, it’s estimated that only one
in every fifty treated for the disease actually
needs treatment.
But there is currently no way of knowing who
that one man is.
Lisa, who is Head of the Prostate Cancer
Research Group in the Adelaide Medical
School and the Freemans Foundation Centre
for Men’s Health at SAHMRI, is working to
change this by studying molecules called lipids
to find out how a cancer will behave so doctors
ALUMNI MAGAZINE - SUMMER 2018
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