Dunedin Hospital surgical registrar and Dunedin School of Medicine Chatterjee Laboratory honorary research fellow Dr Jim Smith has been awarded the 2024 Roche Translational Cancer Research Fellowship, worth $40,000.
"I’m massively honoured to win such a prestigious award, particularly with the massive impact that the people in the past who have won it have had in their respective fields.
"For me as an emerging researcher, it’s a huge opportunity to put my career development in the research space alongside my clinical work."
He said the funding would also allow him to continue working on a prostate cancer research project that was established in 2021, with funding from the T.D. Scott Chair in Urology Trust.
"My interest is around developing new molecular biomarkers for improving prostate cancer detection and disease monitoring for New Zealand men.
"Currently, we have PSA screening as our standard screening test.
"Unfortunately, that’s used in what’s called an opportunistic way, rather than a structured screening programme.
"And it also overdetects a lot of lower-risk prostate cancer.
"We also have MRI that is emerging as a tool for improving our detection of prostate cancer, but it’s quite expensive and it’s not equitably accessible across New Zealand.
"So what we’re trying to do is create something that is minimally invasive — like a blood test — that will be more accurate and cheaper to roll out, and therefore more equitable for the entire population."
The project involves genomic and epigenomic profiling of clinical prostate cancer samples, with the aim of identifying molecular biomarkers in New Zealand men.
Dr Smith said, ultimately, the aim was to find a blood test that could show a person definitely had prostate cancer and what stage it was at, and give oncologists some insight into the risk of that cancer so they could say the patient needed surgery or radiotherapy, or not.
"It will also help us track the cancer much more easily," he said.
He hoped a test could be found within the next two years and pilot trials could begin.
"That would be a reasonable goal, I think."
Prostate cancer diagnosis and mortality rates in New Zealand were some of the highest in the world.
So it was hoped an improved blood-based test that was more accessible and equitable would mean diagnosis could happen earlier, leaving more treatment options.
In the future, it was hoped the test could be expanded to the monitoring and management of patients too, he said.
