CANBERRA, May 7 (Xinhua) -- Australia's peak scientific body has launched a partnership with a leading cancer care provider to treat untreatable cancers.
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) on Tuesday announced that it would work with GenesisCare in a 5.1 million Australian dollar (3.5 million U.S. dollar) partnership to develop treatments for the most fatal and difficult-to-treat cancers such as brain and pancreatic cancer.
Using theranostics, an amalgamation of therapy and molecular-level diagnostics, the team will try to identify cancer cells' unique signatures and then design molecules to track and attach themselves to the cells.
"We're targeting cancers that are currently the most 'untreatable' such as brain, pancreatic and ovarian cancers and metastatic cancers, because that's where we think we can make a profound difference," CSIRO project leader Stephen Rose said in a media release.
"We're exploring a very exciting approach called theranostic cancer treatment, which is a type of precision medicine that finds and attacks individual cancer cells in a person's body rather than attacking both cancerous and healthy cells.
"These molecules can then show us exactly where the cancer is located in the body, and deliver radiation directly to the cancer cells."
Almost 50,000 Australians are expected to be killed by cancer in 2019.
Treatments developed under the partnership will be administered to patients through GenesisCare's clinical network, giving Australian patients access as soon as possible.
"We've seen a rapidly developing body of evidence in theranostics in prostate cancer and neuroendocrine tumors, and this partnership aims to accelerate the time it takes to bring findings from the lab to the clinic for other hard to treat cancers," GenesisCare Chief Medical Officer Peter O'Brien said.
"There has been incredible progress in improving outcomes for many tumor groups, however, there's been very little change in mortality rates for some complex cancers, like brain and pancreatic cancer, over the past 35 years."
