Professor Matt Dun, whose work is focused on improving the survival of patients diagnosed with the world’s deadliest and most aggressive form of paediatric cancer, is the Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR) Medallist for 2024.
In 2018, Professor Dun’s research took a deeply personal turn when his two-year-old daughter Josephine was diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) – an incurable childhood brain cancer.
Professor Dun, a paediatric leukaemia research specialist at the University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute,
is the Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR) Medallist for 2024.
He began researching DIPG [diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma], after his daughter Josephine was diagnosed with the disease in 2018, shortly before she turned three.
In 2018, Professor Dun’s research took a deeply personal turn when his two-year-old daughter Josephine was diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) – an incurable childhood brain cancer.
Professor Dun, a paediatric leukaemia research specialist at the University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute,
is the Australian Society for Medical Research (ASMR) Medallist for 2024.
He began researching DIPG [diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma], after his daughter Josephine was diagnosed with the disease in 2018, shortly before she turned three.
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00:00For about 14 years now I've been researching childhood cancers and then
00:10about six years after I had completed my PhD and started my own lab, my daughter
00:15Josephine was diagnosed with DIPG, which is diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.
00:23When Josie was diagnosed we of course were shocked and devastated but also we
00:31were stunned by the lack of treatment options for the disease. That really hit
00:37home for me as a preclinical cancer researcher who was focused on developing
00:42strategies for kids with poor cancers that there could be a cancer that
00:45there's no effective treatments for, so it really encouraged me to start doing
00:49DIPG research. 90% of therapies that are used to treat cancers target proteins
00:57but yet in DIPG we've only really focused on sequencing the DNA of a cell.
01:02It's only thanks to the generosity of families that leave their child's tumor
01:07to our research after they tragically pass away that we've been able to get
01:10enough material to start to sequence the proteins. We're trying to break DIPG
01:17down into a more simple subcategory. In the first instance we're trying to
01:21separate each diagnosis into a particular subtype.
01:27We weren't able to subcategorize Josie's tumor into any particular subtype.
01:34Over time we were exploring drugs focused on her genomic changes. We discovered a new
01:39drug for DIPG called Taxelacib which targeted a mutation that was in Josie's
01:44tumor. That mutation is seen in about 30 to 40% of DIPGs. About seven months from
01:53diagnosis when Josie was in disease progression as it's called, we got
01:58approval from the pharmaceutical companies to get compassionate access to
02:03treat Josie and thankfully it stabilized the tumor for more than three months.
02:10We had a beautiful Christmas with our family and our friends but like all DIPG
02:15journeys, three months after the commencement of those two therapies the
02:18tumor was growing again. My goal was to try and use all the tools I had at my
02:24availability to try and buy more time. Run DIPG started when Josie was an
02:31inpatient at Sydney Children's Hospital and it's enabled us to have a platform
02:35to advocate for DIPG and to fundraise to do critical medical research in an
02:41attempt to increase survival of this devastating tumor.
02:47Once we understand how and why tumors are starting to respond to particular
02:52therapies then we can exploit them. We can make new drugs, we can design better
02:56treatment regimens, we can use therapies in a sequential way because we
03:01understand how a tumor will respond.
03:06It's a huge honor to be named the ASMR Medalist for 2024, knowing those that
03:13have gone before and I look forward to using the platform as best as possible
03:16to highlight the potential of new investment in health and medical
03:21research for Australia. There's a disease that takes the life of a child every two
03:27weeks in Australia but yet we don't have a single therapy for them. The leading
03:32cause of death from childhood cancer remains completely untreatable and I
03:37think that's completely unacceptable.