Analysing the genes to personalise treatments for lung cancer patients

A/Prof Venessa Chin’s grant is funded by the Denton Family Trust for the third year, in partnership with St Vincent’s Curran Foundation

She is based at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney and The Garvan Institute of Medical Research.

A/Prof Venessa Chin is a medical oncologist and post-doctoral researcher. She divides her time equally between treating patients with head, neck and lung cancers and conducting research at The Garvan Institute of Medical Research. A/Prof Venessa is also a member of the Garvan-Weizmann Centre for Cellular Genomics.

Having finished medical school in 2003, she undertook basic physician’s training and started her speciality training in medical oncology in 2009. A/Prof Venessa was admitted as a fellow of the Australasian College of Physicians in 2013 and completed her PhD in 2017. 

During her PhD, A/Prof Venessa’s work examining a gene target in pancreatic cancer led to the design of early phase clinical trials. She also conducted a meta-analysis of all clinical trials in advanced pancreatic cancer for the Cochrane Collaboration which has led to the derivation of some European clinical practice guidelines.  More recently, A/Prof Venessa has designed, implemented and managed two institute-wide tissue and blood biobanks for patients with cancer which will be an excellent resource for translational research on the Garvan/St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney precinct. 

A/Prof Venessa won the Pathfinders Award in 2018 for her lung cancer research idea, the money from which has funded preliminary experiments for her current project.

A/Prof Venessa Chin's research

A/Prof Venessa Chin is now in her second year of her 3-year Cure Cancer Grant.

A/Prof Venessa’s research examines how analysing the genes of cancerous and non-cancerous cells within a biopsy of lung cancer tissue can help personalise treatments for patients and help predict which patients are most likely to benefit from immunotherapy.

Currently, only about 50% of patients who embark on immunotherapy for lung cancer receive benefit.  As a result, a substantial proportion of patients are undergoing therapy which does not benefit them, exposes them to potential side effects and is uneconomical. A/Prof Venessa hopes that her research will allow more accurate predictions for patients who will benefit from immunotherapies, and faster access to alternative treatments for those who it won’t.

A/Prof Venessa hopes to firstly show the clinical utility of single cell sequencing in cancer specimens.  Many of these technologies have been optimised on non-cancerous tissue samples and so assessing their functionality in cancer specimens is an important step. Secondly, she hopes to show that it is possible to predict a patient’s response to immunotherapy in the petri dish, thus helping to personalise therapies for patients.

A/Prof Venessa Chin's inspiration

A/Prof Venessa first became interested in medical oncology in 2007 when working as a junior doctor:

“I was struck at how patient-focused all the medical staff were and also how quickly research in this field moved.  I began my PhD at the Garvan Institute in 2011 in the field of clinical genomics where I began to realise the potential of personalising therapy with the study of cancer genomes.  The ability to analyse the genomes of single cells is a relatively new technology and translating this exciting advance in science to the clinic has become a passion of mine.

“I am inspired every day by my patients, who whilst undergoing sometimes toxic therapies for incurable disease donate their time, tissue and ideas to research to help patients like them.  It is for them that I do the research.”

The importance of cancer research funding

“This money will allow this project to flourish over the next 3 years. I expect that in the short term, we will be able to complete our research aims, but in the last year of the project, much work will be devoted to the clinical translation of this idea,” she tells us.

“We will be able to refine the bioinformatics pipeline to suit a clinical timeframe and then design a clinical trial which allows us to test this technology in patients.  Therefore, this funding is allowing us to bring cutting edge scientific technologies to the clinic so that patients can benefit from them.

“These grants are incredibly important, allowing me to fund my salary and use other funds awarded for this work for sequencing costs which can be considerable.”

“I am inspired every day by my patients. It is for them that I do this research.”

Together, we can cure cancer.

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