The research team: (L-R) Dr Vanathi Perumal, Prof Joshua Dass, Prof Satvinder Dhaliwal, Prof Crispin Dass, Prof Arun Dharmarajan and Dr Tammy Corica in CHIRI’s lab.
Three Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute (CHIRI) researchers involved in a pilot clinical trial are circling in on new ways to improve radiotherapy treatments for head and neck cancers.
Working in collaboration with researchers from Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and Curtin University, their goal is to manipulate radiotherapy techniques used as the current primary treatment for these cancers to improve patient outcomes and reduce treatment failure rates.
The team is investigating a way of doing this by tracking circulating tumour cells (CTCs) and circulating cancer stem cells (CCSCs) in patients’ blood at various stages of disease progression and treatment.
“Our initial proof-of-principle study on healthy volunteers has been completed and the data looks promising, giving us the confidence in proceeding to patient studies,” lead researcher Professor Joshua Dass said.
“We are ready to progress our research through the next exciting phase and hopefully come up with some new ways to treat what are the seventh most common forms of cancer in Australia and the world.”
Josh is an Associate Professor from Curtin University’s School of Medicine and Head of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital (SCGH). He’s working in collaboration with principal investigators Dr Vanathi Perumal (CHIRI and SCGH) and Clinical Research Coordinator Dr Tammy Corica (SCGH); and co-investigators Cancer Stem Cell Biologist Professor Arun Dharmarajan (CHIRI), Biostatistician Professor Satvinder Dhaliwal (Curtin) and Cancer Cell Biologist Professor Crispin Dass (CHIRI).
The clinical trial involves first identifying and then counting CTCs and CCSCs in peripheral blood samples of patients receiving radiotherapy at SCGH. If CTCs are identified, they will be monitored over time to identify whether a drop in CTC count occurs after the commencement of radiotherapy. Samples taken through the study will be analysed at CHIRI’s state-of-the-art facilities at Curtin University.
The team’s first review paper, “Circulating Tumour Cells (CTC), Head and Neck Cancer and Radiotherapy; Future perspectives” was published in the prestigious journal Cancers in March this year.
Australian physician Thomas Ashworth was the first to discover the existence of CTCs in post-mortem liquid biopsy studies he carried out in 1869. He found that CTCs escape from the primary tumour and enter the bloodstream to lodge in different organs or re-establish themselves in the primary site of disease (known as tumour self-seeding). Even high-resolution medical imaging technologies do not detect the early spread of tumour cells, limiting the potential for early detection.
Research into ways of detecting CTCs could therefore hold the key to a better understanding of cancer and disease spread, and integration with treatment methods such as radiotherapy can better inform clinicians how to best customise treatments to individual patients.
