Grant to study stomach cancer
DUNEDIN researcher Dr Sharon Pattison has won a fellowship to study stomach cancer survival, using new technology, not yet available in New Zealand.
Dr Pattison, a University of Otago researcher and medical oncologist, is ‘‘pretty excited’’ to receive the Roche NZ Translational Cancer Research Fellowship.
This annual award, amounting to $30,000, will further her cuttingedge research on interactions between cancer cells and the immune system.
She has been studying how a protein complex called the immunoproteasome — present in both normal and cancer cells— can influence survival from cancer.
One of the protein complex’s recognised functions was is to alter the range of antigens presented on the surface of cancer cells and to affect the ensuing anticancer immune response.
The award was announced last night at the New Zealand Society for Oncology’s annual conference in Wellington.
Much was still unknown about immunoproteasome, and how it might contribute to cancer progression and survival.
‘‘Hopefully we’ll get closer to the truth of what’s happening, and in more detail and over more time,’’ Dr Pattison explained yesterday.
The award means a member of her small research team can travel to the Walter and Eliza
Hall Institute in Melbourne where they have been given access to lattice light sheet microscopy.
This is a novel way of imaging live cells over an extended time.
This new approach will allow her team to watch dynamic interactions between cells and better understand the function of immunoproteasome.
The research may identify new strategies used by cancer cells to escape destruction by the immune system, and potentially identify new targets for cancer therapies, she said.
A better understanding of how this complex changed the interaction between cancer cells and immune cells, and also any treatment targets identified through this research, could also prove significant with other types of cancer and potentially autoimmune and neurological diseases, she said.
Dr Pattison studied at Otago and Melbourne universities and, in 2016, was appointed as a senior lecturer in the Otago department of medicine, and also as a medical oncologist, SDHB.