Research Institute: Children's Cancer Institute of Australia
Amount granted: $1.5 million
Year granted: 2014
The funding ACRF has enabled the establishment of a unique precision (personalised) medicine centre which heralds a new era in childhood cancer research and treatment. The ACRF Child Cancer Personalised Medicine Centre was officially opened by His Excellency General the Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove AK MC (Retd), Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia and Patron of Children’s Cancer Institute in September 2015.
The Centre houses robotics, libraries of known and clinically-approved drugs, expanded tumour bank facilities, tissue culture and a state-of-the-art laboratory information management system. It also serves as operational headquarters for the Zero Childhood Cancer program, a national initiative of Children’s Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick.
Over the next years, the Centre will receive and process hundreds of samples of patients’ tumours from partner children’s hospitals around Australia, will analyse the samples and test them against libraries of drugs approved for a range of adult and child cancers.
The drug-screening data that the robots will identify, the drugs and drug combinations most likely to be effective in stopping the growth of each individual patient’s cancer cells, will form part of the reports that will go to clinicians, to guide treatment as part of the national clinical trial of the Zero Childhood Cancer Program.
Chief Investigators: Professor Michelle Haber AM, Professor Murray Norris, Professor Glenn Marshall AM, Professor Maria Kavallaris, Professor Richard Lock, Associate Professor Paul Ekert
What your donations have achieved
Cervical cancer vaccine
We gave initial seed funding to Professor Ian Frazer’s research into the cervical cancer (HPV). Over 150 million doses of vaccine have been delivered worldwide to date.
The pill that melts away cancer
Our long term support of cancer research at WEHI has led to a treatment that melts away certain advanced forms of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. It has been approved for clinical use in the US, European Union and Australia and is being trialed for other types of cancer.
Personalised cancer diagnosis
In 2015, we awarded $10 million seed funding to an ambitious cancer proteome project that aims to provide each cancer patient a personalised treatment plan within 36 hours. This will improve treatment outcomes and help avoid unnecessary treatments.
Zero childhood cancer
We are one of the founding partners of the initiative that will tackle the most serious cases of infant, childhood and adolescent cancer in Australia. It is a key step towards the program vision of one day helping to cure 100% of children with cancer.