Australian Cancer Research Foundation funding for the Centre for Integrated Cancer Systems Biology
Lisa Butler is part of a team that has been awarded $2.5 million in funding from the Australian Cancer Research Foundation for the Centre for Integrated Cancer Systems Biology.
The team, led by Prof Tim Hughes from SAHMRI, also includes other researchers from The University of Adelaide (Andrew Zannettino, Stan Gronthos, Wayne Tilley, Tim Price, Dan Worthley, Vincent Bulone) and SAHMRI (Deb White, Chris Proud, Steve Wesselingh, David Lynn).
The program is funding a new facility housing state-of-the-art equipment to interrogate the metabolomic, lipidomic and proteomic landscape of prostate cancer as well as leukaemia, myeloma and colorectal cancer clinical samples. With improved sensitivity of the new instruments, detailed analyses which have previously been impossible can now be performed on smaller tissue specimens. Importantly, expert analysis will integrate the outputs of these analyses to identify novel, important molecules and pathways that play critical roles in cancer development and progression.
Specifically, for prostate cancer, this new equipment will vastly enhance the resolution and sensitivity of our lipid imaging work, allowing us to see more precisely where different lipids are located within clinical prostate tumours. Consequently, we will detect and quantify much lower abundance molecular disease markers, which cannot currently be studied, and allow much more accurate mass and cellular resolution. The image shows lipid species detected in different areas of a prostate cancer using our current instrument. Images such as these will be vastly improved using the new equipment, which will also allow us to assess a wider range of lipid species.
The facility will be located at SAHMRI and the University of Adelaide’s newly constructed Adelaide Health and Medical Sciences (AHMS) Building.