New Delhi: In a bid to make radiation therapy more effective against brain tumours, researchers from Australia are challenging decades-old assumptions about brain cancer treatment.
While radiation therapy is vital to treating brain tumours, scientists do not fully understand how it affects the tumour cells, the healthy cells and the body’s immune system.
The project, which questions the age-old assumptions linked to treating brain cancer and looks for fresher alternatives, is being led by Professor Ivan Kempson from Adelaide University in Australia. It has received a funding of $240,000 from the University of Newcastle and will be the first project to be announced under an Australian funding initiative designed to strengthen research on the treatment of brain cancer.
Professor Kempson, a biophysicist at the Adelaide University’s Future Industries Institute, said that much of what is accepted about brain cancer treatment dates back to research from the 1960s and 1970s.
“We’re going back to basics, questioning long-held assumptions and using new technologies to better understand what is really happening at a cellular level,” Kempson was quoted as saying. He added that it was time to take a fresh look into the treatment as there was still so much that is unknown about brain cancer and how radiation therapy affects the human body.
Objectives of the new research
For this, researchers in Australia now have access to specialised tools that can measure radiation damage to the DNA — a level that has not been achieved before.
Radiation therapy kills tumour cells in the brain by damaging its DNA. Under the new project, researchers hope to identify the extent of this DNA damage and exactly how it occurs. By doing so, they hope to increase the effectiveness of the treatment while protecting the healthy brain tissue.
“We’re looking at how we can enhance DNA damage in tumour cells, but protect DNA in normal cells as well,” Professor Kempson said.
Another aspect to be studied under the new research project is how radiation therapy influences the human body’s immune system. Researchers believe that the body’s own immune response could play a significant role in helping fight brain cancer but there is not enough research to show that.
To fill this gap, Professor Kempson’s team is working closely with doctors at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, doing research in a real-world treatment environment in an attempt to gain insights that traditional laboratory studies alone cannot provide.
“For families affected by brain cancer, advances are urgently needed. The outcomes are very poor and survival rates have changed little in the past 35 years, with only two in 10 patients surviving beyond five years. It kills more children than any other disease and more people under 40 than any other cancer,” Kempson was quoted as saying.
According to a report by Newswise, one Australian is diagnosed with brain cancer every five hours, yet research on its treatment receives less than 5 percent of Australia’s cancer research funding.