NSW Australian of the Year: Professors Georgina Long & Richard Scolyer

Australian Community Media

Professor Georgina Long AO and Professor Richard Scolyer AO from the University of Sydney and Co-Medical Directors of the Melanoma Institute have worked together to develop life-saving melanoma treatments.

Transcript

00:00 I'm Georgina Long and I'm Richard Scoglia.

00:03 Together we're the co-medical directors at Melanoma Institute Australia.

00:08 We are the largest melanoma research and clinical care centre in the world.

00:13 Our goal is to do research, educate and clinical care of people with melanoma and complex skin cancer.

00:20 We've been working hard for many years to achieve zero deaths from melanoma.

00:25 In fact, 15 years ago if you had advanced melanoma most patients were dead within five years.

00:32 But through incredible discoveries that have made in melanoma, clinical trials that Georgina has led,

00:39 we've reduced the lethality of advanced stage melanoma and now survival is more than 50% at five years.

00:46 So what have been these breakthroughs and what's the progress we've made in melanoma as a cancer?

00:53 Well, we've always known that melanoma had an incredible relationship, a tricky relationship with the immune system.

01:00 But about 15 years ago we started to get on the track of something that actually worked

01:06 and these were called checkpoint inhibitor immune therapies.

01:09 And through clinical trials and really decades of research prior to that,

01:14 we saw our first success with these immunotherapies, drug therapies in advanced melanoma.

01:20 That's melanoma that is spread around the body.

01:23 With those initial trials we've built on that success and now we have patients who are cured.

01:29 And the trick was actually trying to utilise the immune system in a very specific way

01:36 to seek out the melanoma cancer cells and kill them.

01:41 And that result has been transferred to many other cancers now,

01:46 including lung cancer, renal cell or kidney cancer, bladder cancer, head and neck cancer

01:53 and some rare subsets of breast cancer even.

01:57 In June this year I was diagnosed with brain cancer.

02:01 A subtype called glablastoma actually had the worst of the worst.

02:06 It's an incurable brain cancer and I've been fighting that battle since that time.

02:11 We've been applying all we've learnt from melanoma as a cancer to Richard's glablastoma

02:18 and hope that the learnings we've taken from melanoma can be applied to many more cancers.

02:24 Like Georgina, I'm also intrigued by the science behind cancer.

02:30 And we know we can make a difference for one patient when we're treating them,

02:33 but we want to do bigger than that.

02:35 We want to change the field to benefit many, many thousands of patients

02:39 who don't necessarily get to come and see us.

02:43 Our key mission is to achieve zero deaths from melanoma

02:49 and impact other cancers as we do so.

02:53 [Music]

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