By Ethan Rix by abc net Australia
Posted
When Bruce Glover was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer, he quickly realised life would not be the same.
“My doctor put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I’m your friend for life,’ and I realised at this stage it wasn’t going to be cured,” he said.
The 69-year-old runs his own business on the Gold Coast but has found it harder to stay on top of his game since being diagnosed with myelofibrosis in 2018.
“I used to be like the Energiser battery — I could outrun anyone in business, work and so forth,” he said.
“I can’t do the things I used to do, which gets extremely frustrating.”
But a recent stroke of luck for a team of Adelaide researchers could lead to the first possible effective treatment for the rare and crippling blood cancer.
Myelofibrosis, a type of bone marrow cancer, affects about one in 100,000 people in Australia and can often lead to complete marrow failure or even acute leukaemia.
Daniel Thomas, leader of the Myeloid Metabolism Lab at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), has been searching for better therapies for primary myelofibrosis for three years.
“It progresses over a period of three to five years, resulting in severe fibrosis of the marrow, and it can sometimes change into acute leukaemia where patients get sick extremely quickly,” he said.
Dr Thomas and his team of Adelaide researchers were trying to create a tool to help understand how the disease impacted the human body, but what they ended up discovering was much more extraordinary.
“As we were making an antibody to try and understand how calreticulin protein worked inside stem cells … we were completely shocked to find out that it actually stopped their (cancer cells’) growth,” he said.
Dr Thomas first assumed the results were a mistake.
“I said, ‘We have to repeat this. This is too good to be true,'” he said.
But after multiple tests, he was convinced they had found a treatment for what is often considered an “undruggable mutation”.
“And low and behold, the antibody actually stopped these [cancer cells] growing out but did not stop a single normal healthy stem cell growing,” Dr Thomas said.
The new antibody is currently being prepared for early-phase clinical trials set to run in South Australia later this year.