Dr Matteo Carlino

 
Our Guest speaker at Tuesdays meeting was Dr Matteo Carlino, recipient of the Gordon Braid Scholarship and the Australian Rotary Health Scholarship.  Dr Carlino was introduced by John Ferguson.
 
Dr Carlino is a specialist Clinical Oncologist and he spoke of the drastic changes that have taken place over the last five years in Melanoma research.  He told us of his first experiences with recording the reactions of patients to a new experimental drug.  Well into 50 to 60 percent of the patients showed improvements.  With many of the patients it was short lived but in limited numbers the improvement was ongoing.  His challenge was to determine why the drugs stopped working, and that was when the the Gordon Braid Scholarship and the Australian Rotary Health Scgholarship began to support the research. 
 
He said he had a unique group of engaged patients.  They were committed to the research and would report judiciously when a new lump would appear and ask, 'what do you want to do with it',  not feeling sorry for themselves, but wanting to make a contribution.   He took their lumps and grew them in laboratory dishes.  Working with the patients and at the same time growing their lumps in the laboratory, gave him a great insight into what was happening when the drug was working and what was happening when it stopped working.  This allowed him to administer additional drugs and monitor the effect.  The resulting research has brought the drug from only available in two hospitals in 2010 to today being on the government funded prescriptions list (PBS) and extended the patient beneficial working time from 6 to 9 months.
 
They are now at the stage where they can take patients cancer samples and grow them in the laboratory and test which combination of drugs works best.   He regularly visits the patients in the clinic and then goes back to the laboratory and looks through a microscope at their cancers.  Their cancers have different personalities, some grow fast, some grow slow.  He said that these 10 or 12 individual patients, have done more for melanoma research than they could have ever imagined. 
 
Of all the people who get incurable cancer, one in five hundred simply get well.  For some reason there bodies immune system defeats it.  Consequently, Matt is now involved in research on how to manipulate peoples immune system to control cancers.  This research has contributed to the release of a new drug onto the PBS referred to as the Ron Walker drug.  Ron Walker was the first patient to take this combination of tablets and immune drugs, and his cancer has been under control for three years.
 
Dr Carlino took several questions and was given a vote of thanks by Mark Hillis.