The Kids cancer researcher and clinician Dr Nick Gottardo has today been announced as the recipient of a 2017 Innovation Grant from the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation. He is one of five recipients of more than $1million worth of research funding aimed at improving survival rates for this disease.
Dr Gottardo, who is Co-Head of the The Kids Research Institute Australia's Brain Tumour Research Team and a Consultant Paediatric Oncologist/Neuro-Oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, will receive $100,000 per year for the next two years.
The grant will help fund a study looking at mixing traditional treatments with new drugs to improve outcomes for children diagnosed with brain cancer. It’s hoped the research will improve the efficacy of radiation treatment by stopping DNA repair in cancer cells that often results in regrowth of tumours.
iCHK and iATR are drugs that stop DNA repair and cause cancer cells to die, and the study will aim to show that these drugs kill brain cancer cells without causing damage to healthy brain tissue. If successful, the project will lead to new clinical trials and help achieve better quality of life for patients, and ultimately, increased survival. The project is due to commence in early 2018.
Dr Gottardo hopes this research will considerably improve the way we treat brain cancer.
“We need to find better, more targeted therapies with fewer side effects so we can give these kids the best possible chance of a cure and long, dignified lives," he said
Cure Brain Cancer Foundation CEO Michelle Stewart said innovation is key.
“Brain cancer survival rates have not changed in over 30 years, so we know that we need to innovate and do things differently if we’re going to see a real shift in survival. With our Innovation Grants, we are backing ambitious projects with potentially high reward, and I’m very excited to see the results of Dr Gottardo’s project over the coming years,” she said.
To find out more about Dr Gottardo’s project and the full list of 2017 research grants, visit Cure Brain Cancer Foundation’s research programs page.
About Dr Gottardo
Dr Gottardo's medical career began at Leeds University with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery/Chirurgery. He worked for two and a half years as a doctor in the UK, before heading to Australia in 1996, where he took up a position at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children and began a PhD at The Kids. After completing his PhD, Dr Gottardo headed to St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, USA, one of the world's premier childhood cancer institutes.
He spent three years at St Jude as a post-doctoral brain tumour fellow and gained extensive experience in the laboratory in brain tumour model generation, preclinical testing and brain cancer cell biology, as well as expertise in the management of children with brain tumours in the clinic.
Dr Gottardo returned to Perth in 2008 as a Consultant Paediatric Oncologist/Neuro-Oncologist and established the Brain Tumour Research program at The Kids Research Institute Australia. In 2012, he was awarded the Raine Clinician Research Fellowship and in 2016 the Cancer Council Western Australia Research Fellowship.
In his clinical capacity, Dr Gottardo is the Head of the Paediatric Oncology/Haematology Department at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children. He collaborates extensively both nationally and internationally; nationally he is the Deputy Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Children’s Haematology and Oncology Group (ANZCHOG) and Chair of their Central Nervous System (CNS) Tumours Subgroup, and a Board member of the Australian Children’s Cancer Therapy (ACCT) group.
He is a founding member of the Brain Cancer Discovery Collaborative (BCDC) – a collaborative network consisting of the best brain cancer scientists and clinicians across Australia. Internationally he is a member on the North American based Children’s Oncology Group (COG), the largest children’s cooperative clinical trials group, CNS Tumour Committee and leads the COG’s upfront clinical trial for patients with WNT-driven medulloblastoma. He is also a member of the International Medulloblastoma Working Group.