Geneticist awarded fellowship

ODT 24.10.2009

University of Otago geneticist, Associate Prof Parry Guilford, has gained a James Cook Fellowship to pursue innovative research aimed at reversing or preventing the early stages of stomach cancer.

The two-year fellowship will allow Prof Guilford, of the university's Cancer Genetics Laboratory, to extend his ground-breaking work on the genetics of stomach cancer.

His planned research involves "very promising" new approaches which could lead to much earlier detection of stomach cancer and other common cancers, as well as potentially enabling therapies to be undertaken much earlier.

James Cook Fellowships allow top researchers to undertake concentrated work in their fields of expertise, and are funded by the Government and administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Recipients receive $110,000 a year and a further $10,000 in study costs.

Prof Guilford's fellowship programme is titled "Epigenetic approaches to cancer prevention and therapy" and starts next year.

Epigenetic changes involve chemical modifications in the DNA which affect the activity of genes, including the switching off some tumour-suppressor genes.

"The exciting thing about these epigenetic changes is that they are potentially reversible," he said on Friday.

"The initial goal of my programme is to develop a chemoprevention strategy to reverse or prevent the earliest stages of stomach cancer.

"Currently, the only preventive measure available is the drastic option of surgically removing the stomach in individuals known to be at high risk.

"This new programme will provide the foundations for establishing clinical trials of epigenetic drugs for people at greatest risk of this disease."

Such drugs interfere with mechanisms that enable the cancer to develop.

Early signs of colorectal cancer were potentially detectable in cells from the colon wall which could be purified from a fecal sample, he noted.

This could eventually result in less need to undertake colonoscopies for initial screening or later surveillance.

He was delighted to win the fellowship, which enabled him to become more fully involved with epigenetics, which was an "exciting new field sitting at the interface between the environment and the genome".