Rachel’s grant is co-funded with Cure Cancer, Cancer Australia and 50% funded by our principal supporter, the Can Too Foundation.

Rachel is based at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research.

Dr Rachel Thijssen admits she’s always passionately sought answers for the question “why,” especially when researching cancer.

“It’s a complex story and I yearn to solve the puzzle,” says Rachel, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Victoria.

Dr Rachel Thijssen's research

In particular Rachel hopes her Cure Cancer-supported work will help provides answers for sufferers of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL), a slow-growing form of the blood cancer. The laboratory she works in contributed significantly to the development of venetoclax, a new treatment that targets the key cell survival protein BCL2 and is effective for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia patients. However, while the drug achieves “deep and durable responses,” in most patients the disease returns while they’re on treatment. Rachel aims to discover why it fails.

“My research could help explain how blood cancer cells evade death and potentially lead to the development of novel approaches to treat CLL and other blood cancers,” she says. “My end goal is to design new venetoclax combination therapies to completely eradicate the cancer.”

She played a key role in the recent description of a mutation in BCL2, found in some CLL patients who make progress while on venetoclax treatment. This investigation was published as a co-first author paper in the respected journal Cancer Discovery, making “an enormous impact internationally”.

“The work lays the foundation for treatments that target this specific mutation,” she adds.

Rachel’s inspiration

Born in the Netherlands, Rachel completed her PhD in the Immuno-Hematology department of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam in 2016. She moved to Australia in 2017 to take up her first postdoctoral appointment at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, a world-leader in cell death studies.

Since her PhD studies, Rachel has been working with leukaemia cells taken from patients who have relapsed while on therapy. Because further treatment options are so limited, many of these patients have died. “They inspire me to rectify the outcome,” she says. 

Providing further motivation is a friend who was diagnosed with leukaemia while Rachel was completing her PhD studies. His disease is now stable, but he needs to take medication every day. “Unfortunately, with most blood cancers you can’t say it’s completely gone and won’t come back,” she says. “This really drives me to seek a cure, so patients don’t have to live with that fear and uncertainty.”

The importance of funding

Rachel is hugely grateful for her Cure Cancer grant which she believes will help her to transition from postdoctoral studies to becoming a leader of her own independent laboratory in future.

“A big thank you! With this funding opportunity we’re a step closer to better treatment approaches. Without research we wouldn’t have developed venetoclax, and the work Cure Cancer does in fundraising and their most generous donors allow me to continue this important study.”

Today there are better treatment options than ever for cancer patients and research is making rapid progress, she points out. Survival rates in most blood cancers have improved, giving people hope and, importantly, options. “Research is like a roll of tape; it sometimes takes ages to find the beginning, but when you find it the results can unravel quickly, and is so very rewarding.”

“My end goal is to design new venetoclax combination therapies to completely eradicate the cancer”

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