Professor Jenette Creaney has been announced as a recipient of a Cancer Council WA Research Fellowship, which will support her research into neoantigen anti-cancer vaccines.
The Fellowship is awarded to outstanding cancer researchers so they can undertake research that will be of major benefit to Western Australian health and medical research. It has a value of up to $480,000 AUD, active over four years.
The Cancer Council WA Research Fellowship will enable Prof Creaney to investigate more effective methods for developing neoantigen anti-cancer vaccines. Neoantigen anti-cancer vaccines train the immune system to recognise specific mutated proteins that are only expressed by tumour cells and not by the normal cells in the body. This approach can be applied across different forms of cancer.
However, many of the details of the endogenous neoantigen immune response are currently not well-known, which may affect the selection of vaccine targets and subsequently the efficacy of the treatment. Prof Creaney aims to improve the methods used to select neoantigen targets for clinical efficacy. The goal of the project is to advance personalised medicine for people with cancer.
Prof Creaney is the Scientific Director of the National Centre for Asbestos Related Diseases (NCARD), a position she assumed earlier this year. In addition to her directorship, she is the Head of the Biomarkers and Discovery team at NCARD, which is primarily concerned with discovering new biomarkers for mesothelioma and lung cancer, sequencing the genetic landscape of mesothelioma tumours, and studying immunology in mesothelioma.
She is also the Manager of the NCARD Biobank, one of the largest collections of samples from people with asbestos-related diseases in the world. The Biobank has been part of global medical research efforts, including international tumour characterisation consortia The Cancer Genome Atlas. Both NCARD and Prof Creaney would like to take this opportunity to express our deep gratitude for the generosity of patients and their families, without whom the Biobank and its achievements would not have been possible.
Previously, Prof Creaney had received iMig’s Young Investigator of the Year Award and the University of Cincinnati’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Congratulations to Prof Creaney on her accomplishment!
Click here to read the Cancer Council WA media statement.
Click here to read the University of Western Australia’s media statement.