The Woolcock Institute of Medical Research

In the Woolcock Centre for Lung Cancer, Dr Maddie Berry’s project aims to develop a new therapeutic approach for lung cancer, a disease responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally each year - including 9,000 in Australia. Alarmingly, more than half of all patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage, where treatment options are limited and prognosis remains poor, with stage IV metastatic lung cancer remaining incurable. In Australia, the overall five-year survival rate is just 26 percent, dropping drastically to 3 percent for those diagnosed at stage IV. The annual estimated burden on the Australian healthcare system is $448 million.

In recent years, new therapies, including small molecule inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies, have improved survival rates. However, the development of tumour resistance to these therapies remains a problem. Also, a substantial number of lung tumours do not respond to these new therapies at all, highlighting an urgent need for accessible, effective treatments that can be rapidly integrated into existing treatment plans.

The Woolcock Centre for Lung Cancer is collaborating with Professor David Currow and Dr Stephen Morrell who investigated how the timing of antibiotic use may affect treatment effectiveness in cancer patients. Tetracycline exposure during some therapies was associated with improved survival. A clinical trial is currently in progress to test the use of doxycycline as an adjunct to some systemic therapies in people with lung cancer.

Maddie is investigating the effect of doxycycline on lung cancer cells grown in the laboratory. She is testing the hypothesis that doxycycline interacts synergistically (a greatly enhanced response) with some anticancer drugs, producing a markedly enhanced ability to target and eliminate cancer cells. This approach has already been highly successful, demonstrating synergistic killing of cancer cells using doxycycline combined with the chemotherapy drug carboplatin and some EGFR-targeted drugs. She is currently implementing cutting-edge molecular techniques to identify the relevant cellular pathways and processes that are altered by the co-treatment. Rather than developing new drugs for specific patient subgroups, her approach focuses on repurposing and enhancing the effectiveness of existing treatments to achieve immediate clinical impact for more patients.

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• Our Centre for Lung Cancer Research