Brisbane cancer researcher, Dr.Georgia Chenevix-Trench, says her part in the discovery of a gene that causes one of the commonest skin cancers, is the highlight of her scientific life.
Dr.Chenevix-Trench says work will now go ahead to see if other cancers, like bladder cancer and ovarian cancer, can be arrested by using the gene as a "policeman" to halt uncontrollable cell growth that form tumours.
The Queensland Institute of Medical Research scientists, working in collaboration with researchers at Queensland University and teams in the UK, US and Sweden, announced they had cracked "one of the great genetic mysteries" with the isolation of the rogue gene believed to be responsible for the predisposition to basal cell carcinoma, which is the most common form of skin cancer in the world, and which some 60% of Queenslanders develop at some time in their lives. They suspect the gene may also be responsible for many other forms of cancer, including the commonest brain tumour in children, medulloblastoma.
‘We are now looking at a whole variety of cancers,’ said Dr. Chenevix-Trench, whose longstanding interest in the "rash-of-skin-cancers" disease Gorlin’s Syndrome, initiated the detective-work leading to the discovery of defects in copies of the so-called patched gene. Every human inherits two copies of each human gene in every cell of their bodies; but in patients with Gorlin’s Syndrome, one copy of the patched gene in each cell is defective. If at some stage the body acquired a mutation in the remaining copy of the gene, tumours could start growing.
Having discovered the patched "suppressor" gene, the scientists’ aim is to harness the gene’s normal function to halt cell growth. Only when it fails as a "brake", tumours develop. ‘Now we know how it works, gene therapy is no longer the "pie in the sky" it was believed to be when we started out,’ says the scientist.
Dr. Chenevix-Trench, who studied at Trinity College, Dublin, says that if she had 10 people on her research team she could move 10 times faster studying the patched gene’s involvement and possible role in curing other tumours. ‘But today we have only three people on the team; six months ago we had five. We are continually in a state of terror about funding the people we have. We have to devote between a tenth and a fifth of the whole year writing grant applications; trying to convince our peers what we are doing is scientifically viable and whether it is the best way to go.
‘I was appalled to see Mr. Kerry Packer’ (media magnate and Australia’s richest man) ‘donate $15m to an American cancer research institute and not to Australian research. People in this country do not invest in medical research which is grossly under-funded. They are not very philanthropic at the best of times, compared with Americans; and as a result, "risky" projects like ours do not get funded. The institute Mr. Packer donated to would probably receive money in the order of $500m. in gifts. It seems that Australians, with their betting culture, gamble their money away instead.
‘We have a very limited budget using students who are hardly paid, or on scholarships and not paid at all. This is what we have to explain to men who are worried about prostate cancer, or women, breast cancer: that we could hasten and shorten this research by years if only we had the money.’
The Australian Cancer Research Foundation made a grant of $1.096 m. to the Queensland University’s Centre for Molecular and Cellular Biology which worked for four years to help discover the patched gene.
Seventy families in Australia with the rare Gorlin’s Syndrome disease, [which was even found in an Egyptian mummy man thousands of years old],donated blood to help isolate the patched gene. Gene cloning, says Dr. Chenevix-Trench, whose husband, Dr.Nick Martin, is also a geneticist, ‘can be repetitive and boring. ‘We have to keep trying to continue the enthusiasm and ignore the boredom. You don’t become an investigator unless you are incredibly motivated; the work is lowly-paid and insecure, because its continuity depends on funding. But the rewards are enormous and you do it because you love it.
‘Our paper was published in the prestigious scientific journal ‘Cell’, which is head and shoulders in its authority above any other journal, including ‘Science’ and ‘Nature.’ ’
The scientific teams collaborated from either side of the world on the Internet, exchanging some 1,000 E-mail messages and draft papers. ‘There was no other way we could have done it,’ says Dr. Chenevix-Trench. ‘The phone is too expensive and the time differences between countries too awkward; the fax, with changes scribbled on sheets of paper too cumbersome.’
