A botched experiment in a University of Otago research laboratory is the perfect example.
Mātai Hāora Centre for Redox Biology and Medicine researcher Prof Mark Hampton, of Christchurch, said the mistake may have led him and his team of researchers to a possible new treatment strategy for melanoma.
New Zealand has one of the highest melanoma incidence rates in the world — about 13 people are diagnosed with it daily — and 300 die from it annually.
Prof Hampton said the researchers had been studying a particular protein for many years, and used genetic engineering tools to change the protein in cancer cells that they were growing in their lab.
"The original goal was to answer a fundamental question about how the protein worked.
"The cancer cells with the modified protein were very unhappy.
"While the detrimental effects interfered with our original goal, it opened up this new line of research."
He said there were drugs in clinical use that were cleverly designed to just kill cancer cells, and patients often had remarkable initial responses to them.
But unfortunately, some cells would develop resistance to the drugs and the cancer would return.
He said the team discovered changes in resistant cancer cells that may make them vulnerable to other drugs.
So they were now exploring whether a combined treatment could kill resistant cancer cells, and maybe even stop them from developing in the first place.
"Targeted drugs can be very helpful against melanoma cells with mutations in a gene called BRAF.
"We are looking to improve the long-term effectiveness of BRAF inhibitors, which work in about half of all melanoma patients," he said.
Prof Hampton won this year’s Otago Innovation Ltd Proof of Concept Award worth $100,000, which would allow him to advance his team’s research into improving the efficacy of cancer drugs.
He said he and his team now aimed to "prove their concept" and validate their vital work into targeted cancer therapeutics.
