If cancer is caught early, patients have a FAR greater chance of recovery
Most cancer caught at an early stage can be functionally cured. However, for all but the slowest-growing cancers, this is a very short window of opportunity.
Cancer is programmed by its DNA to spread as quickly and as far as it can. By this stage, it is too late for surgery or radiotherapy as the cancer is now growing in multiple
sites around the body. This is where doctors turn to chemotherapy – a systemic approach which works to kill cancer in all those sites.
One or more rounds of chemotherapy is prescribed. Because it affects the whole body – including healthy areas – each round is a 12-week torture for patients. During this time,
they will suffer a whole range of appalling side effects. Hair loss is the often the easiest to cope with. Nausea, loss of appetite, weight loss, continual vomiting and diarrhoea
and pain are much harder to deal with and cannot be well controlled. Only at the end of this gruelling 12 (or 24, 36 or 48) week ordeal can we tell whether the treatment has worked. Sadly, many patients do not even have this time.
Lachlan Bullivant was a healthy, vibrant young man of 17 years.
Lachlan chose to study Neuroscience at university, partly because he had recently been diagnosed with epilepsy. A couple of weeks before he started his course, he had complained of a pain in his shoulder but assumed it was muscle strain. After a trip to the family doctor, Lachlan was sent for a scan. It was on his second day as a fresh undergraduate that he got the results. He had a particularly aggressive and rare bone cancer.
Lachlan was immediately admitted to hospital and a few days later underwent surgery to remove the shoulder socket and the bone in his upper arm. It was replaced with a titanium prosthesis. This was in fact, the easy part of Lachlan’s battle. Because of the aggressive nature of the cancer, he was prescribed four rounds of potent chemotherapy over the course of the next year.
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Kylie slept in a hospital chair beside Lachlan’s bed every single night he spent there.
She had to give up her job as an English Teacher and would have been evicted from their home had it not been for the kindness and fundraising efforts of family and friends. -
Lachlan became weaker and weaker as successive rounds of chemotherapy battered his fragile body.
He spent most of the third round in intensive care, fighting for his life. As the fourth round of therapy began, Lachlan had lost a third of his body weight but still faced 12 weeks of the toxic drugs. He was often semi-conscious. -
At the halfway point of the fourth round, Kylie had to make the most terrifying decision of her life.
Doctors wanted to continue treatment to the end of the fourth cycle and told Kylie that unfortunately, until it was completed, they could not be confident that they had killed enough of the cancer cells.
They were not confident because without better tools, they too were in the dark. The only indicator they had was the physical size of the tumour – an indirect measure of actual cancer cell death which can be very unreliable, leading to false negatives or false positives. This leaves doctors having to advise a standard course of action, without the individualised knowledge which could help so much.
Having seen all three of her children through more than the usual range of childhood illnesses, Kylie knew more than anyone just how sick Lachlan was.
It was then that she had to make the decision to stop the chemotherapy as she feared Lachlan would not survive to the end of the cycle. Can you imagine the
dreadful weight of this decision? Kylie knew that stopping treatment at this stage was a gamble. She was risking her son’s life if there was insufficient cancer
cell death and the cancer returned. If it had come back, there was little chance Lachlan would survive.
A Happy Ending
The doctors had no way of telling Kylie whether this was the right decision.
Thankfully, Lachlan did survive. Kylie worried every day in the years that followed that her son’s cancer would recur – but it has not.
Lachlan recently passed the important 5-year mark and remains cancer-free. Kylie is of course extremely proud – and can at last have some peace of mind.
Lachlan has also graduated in Neurosciences and begun his Master’s.
“My Mum had to make the most terrible decision of her life in stopping my chemo.
Thankfully, it was the right decision and I am now well and healthy. Centenary Institute’s CDI could have prevented her awful dilemma and I urge you to support their work so that other mothers can be saved from this situation.”
How we are helping people facing Kylie’s dilemma
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Incredibly, scientists at Centenary Institute have invented a molecule which could have prevented Kylie’s dilemma.
One of the ‘holy grails’ of cancer research – a molecule which can produce actual images of the dead and dying cancer cells – in real time. This would mean that we do not have to wait for 12 weeks and then simply infer cell death from the size of the tumour – we can see how much cell death has occurred within the tumour. We can then stop treatment and not leave mothers like Kylie to take this drastic decision alone. This is ground-breaking research which you can bring to fruition. Offering it to patients will stop mothers like Kylie having to gamble with their children’s lives because doctors are left in the dark as to the success or otherwise of the treatments they prescribe. -
We have called this new molecule ‘Cell Death Indicator’ (CDI)
It attaches itself to each dead cancer cell and we can then use a standard PET scan to see how much cancer has been killed – even two or three days after treatment has begun. This means that we do not have to continue toxic chemotherapy one moment longer than necessary “just to be sure.” Our Centenary Institute researchers have engineered a single molecule that can address several ‘holy grail’ cancer questions: A test to determine – in real time – if treatment is working or not; a method to guide the personalised medicine for each patient to which we all aspire and a way to determine how aggressive a cancer is.