MARK COLVIN: Queensland scientists say they've made a significant breakthrough in the fight against ovarian cancer. Queensland University of Technology researchers have worked out why the aggressive cancer is often resistant to chemotherapy. They say the finding will help develop a treatment so that more women could survive.
Stephanie Smail reports.
STEPHANIE SMAIL: Angela Clune was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she was 13-years-old. She's now 34.
ANGELA CLUNE: They did say that I had about three months to live, initially. They didn't think that they could be beat it, but, um, I guess with my age and good doctors I... yeah, I got through.
STEPHANIE SMAIL: She had ovarian cancer for two years before she was diagnosed, but responded well to treatment.
ANGELA CLUNE: They removed my right ovary, the fallopian tube and the tube, and then, because it was a cancer and they weren't sure what they were dealing with, I was put on a different cocktail of chemotherapy drugs.
STEPHANIE SMAIL: Unfortunately Angela Clune's success story isn't the norm among women with ovarian cancer. It kills more than half of the Australian women who are diagnosed.
Professor Judith Clements is from the Queensland University of Technology. She says one of the major problems is the cancer can become immune to treatment.
JUDITH CLEMENTS: The women often become resistant to the chemotherapeutic drugs that are used, and so this is the major problem: that even though the chemotherapy appears to work for a while, once they become resistant to it, there are no other drugs at the moment to help those women.
STEPHANIE SMAIL: After 10 years of research, professor Clements has identified two enzymes that make ovarian cancer resistant to chemotherapy.
JUDITH CLEMENTS: We believe that these enzymes, if we could block them in those women that have high levels of them, that they would maybe help their response to chemotherapy. And also they could be use used as a prognostic biomarker to suggest that those women with high levels of these enzymes may not do as well with chemotherapy.
STEPHANIE SMAIL: The research team is using 3D technology to help them understand how the cancer behaves in the human body.
JUDITH CLEMENTS: Most of the research that many of us have done over the last 20 or so years has been with cancer cells that we put down on plastic plates in the laboratory in order to make the cancer cells grow.
But you can appreciate that in our bodies the cancer cells aren't sitting on a plastic plate, and so even though we've gained a lot of information from doing studies like that, it's much more preferable to be able to put the cancers cells in an environment that is more three dimensional and indicative of the tumour microenvironment that they would be living in in the woman's body.
STEPHANIE SMAIL: Katie Clift from Cancer Council Queensland says there are 1,300 new cases of ovarian cancer in Australia every year.
KATIE CLIFT: Across the board with ovarian cancer we actually don't know what causes it, we don't have a current screening program that's effective for it, and there's no proven method of prevention for it. So we're kind of in the dark in a sense, and obviously we want more research into those different areas: so prevention, looking at the causes, and then looking at better treatments for it to improve survival rates overall.
STEPHANIE SMAIL: Now scientists know which enzymes make ovarian cancer resist treatment, professor Judith Clements says the next step is finding a way to block them in humans.
JUDITH CLEMENTS: We already have inhibitors made for these enzymes by one of our colleagues here at QUT that we use in our test tube experiments, and it works very well. But we would have to design a more clinically useful drug that works the same way in order to be able to translate that into the clinic.
MARK COLVIN: Professor Judith Clements ending Stephanie Smail's report.