More than two in five Australians will have their lives upturned by a cancer diagnosis by the age of 85 — causing the deaths of 146 people every day.
However, Australian-led efforts at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research have made massive strides in 2025 that could lead to fatality rates dropping significantly.
Research labs led by associate professor Christine Chaffer and professor Alexander Swarbrick are now world leaders in researching the intricacies of breast cancer cells thanks to a $25 million grant from the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
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Chaffer’s team is currently working to find ways to treat breast cancer that returns after treatment, which she says is “more aggressive” and “extremely hard to treat”.
“They just have morphed into more aggressive versions of their former selves,” Chaffer told 7NEWS.com.au.
“My work has really being trying to understand how those cancers change.
“We’ve been working on understanding those fundamental mechanisms of change.
“Our strategy being that if we can understand how they change, then we can come up with ways to intervene and stop that from happening.”
Chaffer said the team has had “fantastic successes this year” including discovering a way to stop cancer cells from changing and becoming resistant to chemotherapy.
Currently in its first therapeutic trial, the brand new treatment is targeted at patients of triple negative and metastatic triple negative breast cancer — the hardest forms to treat.
“This is really a game-changing approach to be able to say that we can actually stop resistance from happening,” Chaffer said. “That’s our ultimate goal.”
The new frontier for future cancer treatments
Despite common belief being that tumors are created by a single cell rapidly duplicating, Swarbrick’s lab is working on identifying as many different types of cells that make up breast cancer, creating the Breast Cancer Cell Atlas.
“The aim here is to build the world’s most detailed cellular map of breast cancer,” Swarbrick said.
“We know that cancers are comprised of different cell types, both the kind of cancer cells themselves, but also other cell types like immune cells.
“And we think understanding the way cells are organised within breast cancers will help us understand the way tumours grow, evolve and respond to therapy.“
Prior to recent advancements, tests on growth biopsies only ever provided a positive or negative result for cancer cells.
Swarbrick’s lab is now laying the groundwork for tests to identify the myriad of different cells that are present, some of which have never been seen before.
Associate Professor Christine Chaffer and Professor Alex Swarbrick. Credit: Garvan Institute of Medical Research
He likened it to being able to identify every person within a city while also having a bank of information telling you each person’s characteristics.
“Research this year has identified several cell types that are found within breast cancers that would probably be lost if we weren’t able to study the tumour cell by cell,” he said.
“But these cell types seem to be really important in organising anti-tumour immune activity and so now we want to understand why some patients have more of these cells, why some patients have less, and how we can more effectively recruit these cells, to fight the tumour for the patient.”
Swarbrick’s work is also playing a part with that of Chaffer, whose team is also using artificial intelligence provided by a team at Yale University to identify individual cells.
The change in tactics means each patient can receive more individual treatments tailored to knock out each type of cancer, unlike more broad treatment types of the past.
The method is now an important piece of the lab’s AllClear program, aimed at identifying cells which are likely to cause a relapse and eradicating them before becoming cancerous and being certain to give patients the “all clear”.
“We want to be able to come up with that treatment right at the outset of a patient’s breast cancer diagnosis that says, ‘you’ve got breast cancer, we think that you’ve got cells that are likely to cause relapse, but here’s a therapy to eradicate them’,” Chaffer said.
However, both researchers said there’s a long way to go and a fruitful year will just play as groundwork for future advancements.
They also believe the techniques used can help with efforts to understand and quash other types of cancer in the future.
“I think that the opportunities are enormous and it’s a really, really exciting time to be in research,” Chaffer said.
She also urged Australians to get checked for breast cancer, as the best chance to survive the disease is to catch it in its earliest stages.
“If you get diagnosed early the chances of survival are really good these days. The treatments and surgery are really effective,” Chaffer said.
