University of Otago (Dunedin) pathology department researcher Associate Prof Aniruddha Chatterjee and University of Otago (Christchurch) honorary senior research fellow and medical oncologist Dr Rajiv Kumar recently won the Roche Translational Cancer Research Fellowship Award, worth $30,000.
New Zealand has one of the highest rates of lung cancer in the world, and Maori are four times more likely to die from lung cancer than non-Maori.
Prof Chatterjee said surgery and radiotherapy were effective treatments for early stage lung cancer, but 80% of patients were diagnosed with late-stage disease when their tumours were no longer curative.
"The challenge with lung cancer is that often we only have small biopsy samples from current techniques.
"When insufficient tissue is available for molecular diagnostics, a repeat biopsy and molecular diagnosis is not always possible."
However, he believed the analysis of tumour DNA circulating in a patient’s blood was likely to provide a solution to this challenge.
He said it had been established that detecting alteration in DNA methylation was one method of detecting tumours much earlier.
Prof Chatterjee and Dr Kumar aim to use advances in next-generation sequencing for robust analysis of a DNA methylation panel in clinical settings.
Dr Kumar said the fellowship funding would be used to develop a DNA methylation panel.
"The opportunity to develop the latest advances in science from the laboratory so they can be applied in clinical settings, and seeing them improve patients’ outcomes, is immensely rewarding."
Roche Products New Zealand general manager Alexander Muelhaupt said the duo’s project had the potential to bring direct benefit to New Zealand lung cancer patients and congratulated them both on the receipt of the fellowship and the work they had done to date.
