Harnessing mRNA for more targeted cancer treatment

Tour de Cure funding will support two researchers in the Hub whose projects tackle the same problem from different directions: how to act strongly on a tumour without harming healthy tissue.

Dr Liam O'Brien is engineering synthetic cytokines. Natural cytokines are powerful immune signals but are toxic when they act throughout the body, so the work is to build versions that switch on their activity at the tumour and stay quiet elsewhere.

PhD scholar Hannah Tompkins is developing mRNA vaccines aimed at cancers that have become resistant to treatment. Many of these tumours survive by becoming invisible to the immune system, and the approach is to restore the signals that let immune cells find them again.

Both projects run in the cancer vaccine laboratory at AIBN and feed into the Hub's off-the-shelf and personalised vaccine programs.

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