WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor Clare Scott

Dr Holly Barker
Senior Research Officer - Scott Lab, ACRF Cancer Biology & Stem Cells division - Cancer Research & Treatments Theme

The WEHI-Stafford Fox Rare Cancer Program: using pre-clinical models and basic research to support precision medicine
 

Join via TEAMS
Includes Q&A session
 

Collectively, rare cancers account for ~22% of all cancer diagnoses and ~30% of cancer deaths. Rare cancers are associated with a poor outcome due to delay in diagnosis, misclassification of subtypes, and lack of evidence-based treatments/access. The WEHI-Stafford Fox Rare Cancer Program (SFRCP) was designed with streamlined ethics, governance, consenting processes, including remote consent from home anywhere in Australia, and data collection protocols to allow analysis of data and tissue from patients with a rare cancer.

To date, 355 rare cancer patients have been accrued to the WEHI-SFRCP, harbouring 432 independent tumours that account for 94 different types of rare cancer. Holly joined the Scott Lab, as the Stafford Fox Centenary Fellow, when the Program was initiated in 2016. She is involved in performing molecular analyses, developing pre-clinical models, and leading research projects that support precision medicine. To date, the team has developed 47 PDX models of different rare cancers and generated cell line and organoid models for further study.

In this talk Holly will describe projects, which use novel pre-clinical models to learn more about the origins and biology of specific rare gynaecological cancers, in order to develop better treatment options to improve outcomes for women with rare cancers.