Guests at the Recent Oscars Lunch glammed up to enjoy the broadcast of the 91st Oscars in style. Guests included the Today Show team, participants in Married at First Site, Doctor Doctor cast members and many more.
Hosted By Channel 9 at Glass Brasserie, guests were treaded to a sumptuous 3 course lunch by Luke Mangan and the team at glass brasserie.
While watching all the events unfold from LA, guests were entertained by Host Tom Steinfort as well as vying for the amazing raffle items which including a 9 litre bottle of Louis Roederer.
Funds raised from the day, a total of almost $40k, will help Cure The Future to fund fund equipment, services and the professional development of Professor John Rasko’s inspirational team of scientists and researchers to enhance their ground breaking work, to have a greater impact now and for generations to come.
Thank you to our major sponsors Volvo, Channel 9, glass brasserie, The Luke Mangan Group for making the event possible.
Thanks also goes to those who supported the event with raffle prizes or products for the event goodie bag, including:
Clinique, Harvey Norman, Kemenys, Sofi Spritz, CharGrill Charlies, Lady Jane, Sparkling White Smile, Warner Bros, Stage and Screen, Pierre Haddad, Flawless Rejuvenation, Liquefy, Coca Cola, Candice PR, DeLorenzo, Sebamed, Zeka Manfred, Slim Secrets, Long Lashes, Taprobane Tea Company, Maine Beach, Skyzone, Holey Moley, Strike Bowling, B x Earth, Veraision Wines, Calabria, The Healthy Chef, Shannakin Fine Jewellery, Loreal, Argyle Inn Taralga, Netball NSW, GlamCorner, Hush Puppies, Universal Pictures, Universal Music.
The Australian Academy of Science have announced their latest awards for outstanding contributions to science with 20 of Australia’s leading scientists receiving a 2019 honorific award.
Dr Justin Wong, a past recipient of a Cure The Future Fellowship has been recognised for his work in gene expression and its applications in cancer therapies having been awarded the 2019 Ruth Stephens Gani Medal.
Dr Wong, then a research officer, received the inaugural Cure The Future Fellowship which provided salary support for 18 months.
Support from Cure The Future has provided Dr.Wong the ability to embark on a project to discover novel mechanisms that regulates gene expression in normal and cancer cells. Over the past 9 years, since receiving the Cure The Future Fellowship, Dr Wong has made many journal contributions and research breakthroughs have resulted in over $5 million dollars in grant funding for more research to find ways to combat cancers.
Every junior researcher requires start up funding to achieve scientific excellence. I am forever grateful to Cure The Future for providing this in the first 2 years of my postdoctoral research. I am a living testimony that Cure The Future contributes towards building the career of a young researcher like myself. Justin Wong
Since receiving the Cure The Future support, Dr. Wong has progressed on to become an independent laboratory head at the Centenary Institute focusing on understanding mechanisms that regulate gene expression and how mistakes in these processes cause cancers.
Congratulations from Cure The Future.
Do you want to help more researchers like Justin?
Your support could help cure the future of thousands of Australians.
Watch the video below which outlines who we are. Here it is. Enjoy.
Cure The Future is a philanthropic foundation that funds pioneering research to cure inherited diseases and cancers through the world leading research and clinical work of Professsor Rasko and his team. We fund equipment, services and the professional development of this inspirational team of scientists and researchers to enhance their ground breaking work, to have a greater impact now and for generations to come.
Your support could help cure the future of thousands of Australians.
The Cure the Future Service Awards where announced recently at the end of year party for both the clinical and research teams of Professor John Rasko AO.
The teams from the Centenary Institute and Department of Cell and Molecular Therapies, enjoyed a well deserved afternoon of relaxation and reflection after a big year of successful grant applications and commencement of ground breaking clinical trials.
The Awards are given to one staff member in each on the teams who have demonstrated excellence throughout the year. The winners of the awards for 2018 were:
Dr Carl Power for excellence in pursuing ethical questions and raising public awareness in the field of Gene and Stem Cell Therapy, in particular for support with the preparations for the ABC Boyer lectures.
Dr Zlatibor Velickovik for excellence in pursuing and developing philanthropic and government sponsored research grants, resulting in several successful grants supporting clinical trials.
Both recipients are pictured below with Cure the Future representatives.
Cure the Future Service Award Presentation – Dianne Langmack OAM(Chair), Professor John Rasko AO, Dr Carl Power (recipient), Jennifer Andrews(Vice Chair), Dr Zlatibor Velickovik (recipient)
Congratulations to Professor John Rasko and his team, who have recently been recognised for their excellent in research and clinical work with funding from the Li Ka Shing Foundation, for a world-first immunotherapy trial for patients with mesothelioma and pancreatic cancer.
The Li Ka Shing Foundation has funded the newly established Li Ka Shing Cell and Gene Therapy Initiative at the University of Sydney to the tune of $4.5 million over 4 years.
The funding will enable clinical trials on both patients with mesothelioma and pancreatic cancer. The trials will involve the reprogramming of CAR T cells, healthy immune cells, which will be reproduced and re injected into to patients to fight and destroy cancer cells. The impact of this technology is profound on participants in the clinical trials.
About CAR T Research
Early clinical data from leading research centres around the World highlights the promise of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells for the targeted treatment of cancers such as pancreatic cancer, muscle cancer, ovarian cancer, some breast cancers and asbestos-related lung cancer.
A collaboration of international researchers agree it is the best possible promise of a cure we have seen – so they have got together to do clinical trials of this treatment. Australia’s team, led by Professor John Rasko, Australia’s leading Cell & Molecular Therapies specialist, will leverage the existing cell manufacturing infrastructure and expertise at the Cell & Molecular Therapies department at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
International collaborators will work together to develop these CAR-T cells – and initiate Phase I clinical trials to treat each of these cancer conditions.
In Australia, the initial focus will be on the treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer. This treatment option will be a first for Australian patients – and cellular immunotherapy of the type proposed here may revolutionise outcomes for patients and their families living with many types of cancer.
Our “CAR-T mesothelin” cancer immunotherapy is potentially capable of targeting pancreatic, ovarian, synovial and mesothelioma (a subset of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos) and well as other lung cancer & breast cancer subsets.
Cure The Future’s mission is to support and enhance the research and clinical work of Professor John Rasko and his team. We are proud support the promotion this initiative.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. Delivered by Professor John Rasko, the 2018 Life Engineered lectures explore ethical and other issues around gene therapy and related technologies, and their potential to cure disease, prolong life and change the course of human evolution.
The first lecture will be broadcast on RN’s Big Ideas at 8pm tonight. In light of this, we’ve asked Merlin Crossley to explain what gene therapy actually is and how we got to where we are with it.
Over the last few centuries, infectious diseases have been understood and tackled, through advances in sanitation, anti-microbial medications and vaccination. One day we may also be able to tackle genetic diseases – lifelong conditions arising from mutations that we inherit from our ancestors or that occur during our development.
We’re over the foothills but we still have mountains to climb in treating genetic diseases.
Step 1 – understanding genetic disease
The key step to tackling infectious diseases was to truly define the nature of the microorganisms that caused them. Similarly, with genetic diseases the first step was to understand and define the nature of a gene.
Our red blood cells carry oxygen with the help of the protein haemoglobin. shutterstock.com
Around the same time in 1949, US chemist Linus Pauling demonstrated that the disease sickle cell anaemia was caused by a chemical change in haemoglobin. He called this the first “molecular disease”. With the advent of DNA sequencing in the 1970s, the actual mutation in the globin gene was identified.Scientists, including Watson, Crick and Franklin, determined the structure of DNA in 1953. Gradually it became clear that a gene was a stretch of DNA that encoded a functional product, such as the oxygen-carrying protein haemoglobin.
Rapidly after this, the genetic lesions responsible for other inherited diseases – such as haemophilia, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy – were identified. From this moment on, the idea of replacing defective genes or correcting them captured people’s imaginations, and this is the basis of what we now call “gene therapy”.
Step 2 – replacing defective genes
Patients suffering from genetic diseases either have a defective gene or may altogether lack a key gene. In the early stages of gene therapy there was no way of correcting genes, so researchers focused on supplementing the body with a replacement gene.
In the 1980s, recombinant DNA technology (where chosen DNA molecules are transferred between individual organisms) was developed by harnessing the miniature machinery bacteria and viruses use to move DNA around. This allowed researchers to isolate individual human genes and encapsulate them in harmless viruses to deliver them into human cells.
In somatic gene therapy, the therapeutic genes can be put inside a virus and transported into the body. shutterstock.com
It was possible to get the genes into certain blood cells and other accessible tissues. This process was termed somatic gene therapy (from “soma” meaning, “the body”) and was distinct from germline gene therapy where eggs or sperm, or early embryos, would be modified and whole people and their offspring changed forever.
Human germline gene therapy is widely outlawed and there is no evidence it has ever been seriously attempted.
But somatic gene therapy has been attempted and, in some cases, has been successful. Viruses really can be made harmless and filled with human DNA, which they deliver into the patient’s cells.
A handful of people have now been successfully treated in this way for haemoglobin deficiencies, haemophilia, and for immune disorders, such as so-called “bubble boy” disease (where victims are particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases).
Step 3 – improving replacement gene therapy
Attempts at these forms of gene replacement therapy began in the 1990s but early results were disappointing. It proved difficult to get the genes into enough human cells, and when the genes did get in they were often turned off after a few weeks.
More worryingly, it was not possible to determine where in the chromosome the replacement gene would land. Often it integrated harmlessly in an unimportant part of the genome, but sometimes it landed near to, and activated, growth control genes called “oncogenes” that drive cellular proliferation and cancer.
Some of the first children treated for “bubble boy” disease developed leukemias. These leukemias were treatable, but the complications, together with immune reactions, such as led to the death of Jesse Gelsinger in an early gene therapy trial in 2000, led to caution.
Over the years, researchers have developed better viruses, systematically improved the gene delivery protocols and found control switches that aren’t turned off by our body’s anti-viral response. In recent gene therapy trials for haemophilia, haemoglobin disorders, and also for specific inherited forms of blindness, many of the patients treated have benefited.
Step 4 – gene correction
The advent of new techniques, most notably CRISPR-mediated gene editing, has led to the idea of correcting a mutant gene rather than adding a replacement. CRISPR is a system that bacteria use to identify and cut invading viral DNA. It has now been used by researchers to direct DNA modification machines to chosen human genes.
We can now develop miniature chemical tools to convert harmful mutations back into normal sequences. News that this technology was being used on human embryos in China created a storm of controversy but so far those experiments have only involved embryos that were known to be non-viable and the research has been purely experimental.
Elsewhere researchers aren’t exploring modifications of whole embryos. Instead the somatic gene therapy approach is being followed, for example, to see if genes can be corrected in a high proportion of blood stem cells and whether these cells can then be transplanted back into the patient to cure their disease.
Step 5 – The future
We will soon see an increasing number of patients helped by both gene replacement therapy and by CRISPR-mediated gene correction. But the work is likely to be focused on a few specific diseases rather than there being a broad advance across all genetic diseases.
An increasing number of patients will soon be helped by CRISPR-mediated gene correction. shutterstock.com
The diseases treated first will share some key characteristics: the genetic defects would be well-understood; they must affect a tissue we can get at easily (blood will be easier than brains and bones); the conditions would be serious and have no other effective treatments.
And they must be so costly in terms of human suffering and economic burdens that a complex and expensive treatment such as gene therapy becomes a viable option.
This means common blood and immune disorders are likely to feature in the first generation trials. Cancer is also a genetic disease, but one typically caused by mutations that accumulate in our cells over time rather than by inherited mutations, and somatic gene therapy, in the form of immunotherapy, involving enhancing the capacity of our immune systems to fight cancer may also become common.
A Nobel Prize was just awarded for anti-cancer immunotherapy, and it is likely that the genetic modification of the immune system will increasingly be used to treat cancers.
The age of gene therapy is arriving but it will be gradual, not sudden. But incrementally, more people will benefit from these treatments.
In the long term, as we all become aware of mutations we carry in our own genomes that may affect our offspring, there may be pressure to correct more and more genetic lesions. This will remain too risky and expensive for many years so gene therapy will likely remain a niche and specialist treatment for the foreseeable future.
Merlin Crossley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic and Professor of Molecular Biology, UNSW
