Australian Museum Eureka Prizes

Cancer Breakthrough Leaves the Animals Behind

New research is saving the lives of both humans and animals by successfully identifying drug resistant cancer cells without animal testing.

Associate Professor Maria Kavallaris, Dr Sela Pouha and Dr Nicole Verrills have been rewarded for this breakthrough research with the $10,000 Voiceless Eureka Prize at this year's Australian Museum Eureka Prizes. The award highlights work that has reduced, or has the potential to reduce, the use of animals or animal products in laboratory-based research, education and testing.

Using new molecular biology and tissue culture technologies, the Kavallaris team not only discovered what makes certain cancer cells unresponsive to treatment, but did so without using traditional animal test subjects.

Australian Museum Director Frank Howarth says, "This work is important not only for its implications for cancer research but because it shows that research progress can be made in a humane way without the use always of animals."

Most current models of cancer research require animal tumor models. Animals are given the disease, monitored and then vivisected to gain insight into what made certain cancer cells resistant to treatments like chemotherapy. This process raises ethical concerns while also complicating the diagnostic program, as stress, diet and physiological differences in animals makes it difficult to determine concrete levels of resistance.

By removing the animal subjects, Kavallaris and her team looked directly at the protein pathways involved in the response to drug resistance and have successfully identified the specific resistant protein. The research is particularly relevant to the treatment of leukemia, where 20% of sufferers relapse after treatment and 15% die of the disease primarily due to their development of drug resistance.

The clinically important results were obtained in the absence of any experiments involving animals or animal tissues.  In doing so they have thus provide a paradigm shift for future such studies.