An accurate, easy and fast test for lung cancer could be within reach in the next decade, after a Dunedin cancer researcher was awarded a major funding grant to collaborate with a world-renowned lung cancer researcher in Austria.
University of Otago pathology and molecular medicine head Associate Prof Glen Reid was awarded $80,000 from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Catalyst Seeding Fund, which would give him access to thousands of lung cancer patient samples collected over the decades by the Translational Thoracic Oncology Laboratory (TTOL) at the Medical University of Vienna, led by acclaimed pathologist Prof Balazs Dome.
Assoc Prof Reid said the TTOL collection would allow Dunedin researchers to find the biomarker that would help diagnose lung cancer, much earlier.
"The Medical University of Vienna has a long history of studying lung cancer and collecting samples from patients.
"There’s cells from lung tumours, cells from any spread of the cancer — so metastasis — as well as blood and other samples.
"They’ve collected thousands and thousands of samples over the years, and so that helps when you’re doing tests to look at which genes or levels of genes might be important for detecting or predicting outcome.
"It’s just a matter of testing more and more samples, and the more samples you test, the more you can be sure that what you find is accurate.
"It’s important that if you have an early biomarker for lung cancer, it should be accurate — it should pick up all the people with lung cancer and not pick up too many people without lung cancer."
The research had been challenging so far, because it was very difficult to collect enough samples in New Zealand, he said.
"If you want to be sure in your results, you need to have a lot of samples to get the statistical power that you need.
"Even though lung cancer is a big problem here, the number of patients is relatively low compared with countries in Europe.
"So this will enable us to accelerate our studies and find a biomarker that will tell us if a person has lung cancer, earlier."
The sooner a test could be found for diagnosing lung cancer, the greater the chances of treating it and surviving it, Assoc Prof Reid said.
"Lung cancer is one of those cancers that’s often detected late — when it’s too late for surgery and there’s no chance of a cure.
"So if we can detect it in the early stages, the long-term survival increases dramatically."
Having access to the Austrian samples was giving him hope they could create an accurate test in the next decade or so, he said.
"That’s definitely the aim.
"We’ve made some progress already, so my colleagues here in pathology have been collecting samples from the New Zealand population, and of course that’s important to make sure we collect samples that relate to our particular population and its ethnic makeup."
As part of the grant, both universities would also have PhD student exchanges.
