(Melbourne, February 4th) -- Australia’s National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has awarded its largest grant for 2009 to the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) in Melbourne.
This grant will allow the LICR to bring together 18 key investigators from five Melbourne institutions to develop new ways of detecting and treating cancers of the colon and rectum, the most common form of cancer in Australia. More than 12,000 people are diagnosed each year with colon cancer and more than one third of those people – 4,000 Australians - will die as a result of this disease.
The Melbourne group, which combines laboratory and clinical investigators, will tackle five key projects relating to the discovery and analysis of the genetic causes of colon cancer, the development of biomarkers for the early detection of colon cancer and the continuing development of therapies targeted specifically to colon cancer cells, including antibody- and nanoparticle-mediated delivery of therapeutics.
According to LICR Melbourne Branch Director, Professor Tony Burgess, the principal investigator of the NHMRC grant, this large award to a collaborative group is consistent with the changing paradigm of cancer research. “Over the past decade or so, we’ve moved away from small groups working on individual aspects of a research problem, to larger collaborative groups in which researchers from multiple disciplines can combine their knowledge and expertise. To progress our efforts to combat colon cancer, we needed to bring together top-quality scientific and clinical minds. This grant creates the collaborative opportunity to improve outcomes for colon cancer patients”.
The LICR Melbourne Branch, located at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and the LICR Melbourne Centre, located at the Austin Hospital, are part of the world’s largest cancer research institute. LICR currently has ten branches in seven countries with an 11th site planned in Singapore. The non-profit Institute’s infrastructure allows it to patent research discoveries, and sponsor and conduct its own clinical trials in Europe, North America and Australasia, meaning that any research findings from the group can be translated rapidly into early-phase clinical trials. Professor Burgess is leading the ‘LICR Colon Cancer Initiative,’ the Institute’s international effort in CRC research.