ACRF Adelaide Brain Cancer Therapy and Imaging Consortium

$4 million awarded to South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute in South Australia to establish the ACRF Adelaide Brain Cancer Therapy and Imaging Consortium.

Harnessing the latest technological advances of Australia’s first proton therapy unit located in Adelaide, this new consortium will for the first time in Australia leverage proton radiotherapy for research purposes. Proton beam therapy provides unique potential as unlike other forms of radiation therapy, is only delivered to the cancerous tissue with very little harm to the surrounding, sensitive normal brain tissue. The purchase and installation of state-of-the-art preclinical imaging will give doctors vital new knowledge to design and test novel cancer treatments and improve the clinical experience of proton beam therapy for patients diagnosed with brain cancer.

While survival and survivorship have dramatically improved in many cancers, brain cancer has remained among the poorest outcomes. This new consortium’s unique ‘bench to bedside’ approach is looking to both improve the efficacy of the proton radiation therapy as well as reduce the long-term drastic side-effects of the current treatments.