The outlook for cancer is now better than ever before and we want the same good outcome for every patient.
We are not there yet, and every life matters.
Your help could mean better and safer treatments that are desperately needed.
Dr Siok Tey and her team is making headlines across Australia
as we are appealing for the community to support her cutting-edge CAR T cell therapy research.
Queensland father of three Andy Scott has been living with myeloma since 2017 and hopes to one day benefit from Dr Tey’s research. While conventional treatments including maintenance chemotherapy have kept his cancer at bay, he knows they will stop working at some point.
Commitment to save lives
As a haematologist specialising in blood cancer, Dr Siok Tey could see the extraordinary potential of CAR T cell therapy while working on its early development overseas two decades ago.
Now she is a world-leader in delivering this cutting edge technology to patients.
A doctor and a scientist, her clinical knowledge combined with her cellular engineering and immunology research expertise gives her the ability to take a CAR T cell therapy from laboratory research through to patients in clinical trials.
The long hours in the lab and on the ward are motivated by a deep sense of duty to help her patients.
The future of cancer treatment
The next generation of immunotherapy is revolutionising cancer treatment.
CAR T cell therapy is harnessing the latest science and technology to outsmart cancer. Immune cells are reengineered with unique instructions to hunt down and destroy a specific cancer. They can kill cancer cells that have evaded chemotherapy and radiation.
This remarkable advance has already had remarkable success in certain blood cancers.
We are working to make this ultra intelligent technology even more effective, and expanding the types of cancer that they can target.
Mother of two and physiotherapist Jane Campbell was struck down with a rare form of lymphoma affecting the brain in September 2022.
Chemotherapy for brain lymphoma can be very tough. It can cure some patients but unfortunately in Jane’s case, it was only partially effective. She would go on to receive other treatments including a stem cell transplant but the cancer would keep coming back.
Jane’s family considered raising hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to join a trial in USA, but it had already closed.
Jane was out of options.
By some miracle of fate, her doctor gave her the best possible news. Dr Siok Tey, a Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital haematologist and a QIMR Berghofer researcher, is running a trial of CAR T cell immunotherapy.
I was just so incredibly grateful. There’s so few people in the whole world that have the best treatment I’ve had.
It’s just incredible that here in Brisbane, we have these very smart people and they’re not willing to accept the status quo. They’re keen to push the envelope.
We have the expertise, the dedication, the compassion and the drive to make this work.
With your help, we can make this cutting-edge treatment available to more people in Australia.
How do we outsmart cancer?
What we have right now are CAR T cells that have a 40-50% success rate for certain types of blood cancer, which is fantastic for these patients who otherwise have 0%.
Where we all hope to be is closer to 100% success rate, across multiple types of cancer.
I’m confident that our work will make a difference so it’s frustrating when we can’t do more because we don’t have the resources.
There are so many talented and dedicated scientists and doctors who would love to work here but have gone overseas for better funding. Your donation could help make us a world leader in this expanding field by building the scientific capacity here in Brisbane.
It will benefit the next generations of scientists and patients in Australia and beyond.