'Cancer reversing' professor takes out top science prize
When they heard their father was about to receive one of the Prime Minister’s Science Awards for 2020, young Noah and Jack Dawson asked him what he’d actually done to win it.
This obliged Professor Mark Dawson, from Melbourne’s Peter McCallum Cancer Centre, to explain his work in simple terms.
“I'm getting a prize for understanding how cancer cells make abnormal decisions and I’ve helped to find some of the first drugs to change these decisions,” he said.
Actually, Professor Dawson is an internationally recognised pioneer in the epigenetics of cancer and in the development of a brand-new class of epigenetic drugs which have the potential to change the way cancers behave.
For this work, on Wednesday night, he was awarded the Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year.
His favourite explanation of the power of epigenetics is to describe how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, turning itself into an entirely different creature but retaining exactly the same genetic code.
The DNA, that contains this genetic code is packaged in each cell, in a way that not all of it is accessible all of the time.
So, while the caterpillar accesses some parts of the genetic code, the butterfly accesses other parts, thus the difference between the two.
He tells his sons each cell in the body contains about two metres of DNA.
“If you took all the DNA out of the body, and stretched it out from end to end, you’d be able to walk to the sun and back, 600 times,” Professor Dawson said.
“So, imagine packaging that into a human body and each cell having to access the right parts of it, in the right place at the right time.”
“We have roughly 20,000 genes but a cell may only express 5000 to 10,000. A skin cell has exactly the same number of genes as a blood cell but expresses different ones.”
Epigenetics controls this access and when a mistake is made, a cancer may emerge. Epigenetic drugs aim to reverse these poor decisions.
On receiving the prize at a digital ceremony, Professor Dawson, also from Melbourne University, recalled looking down a microscope after treating some cancer cells with a new epigenetic therapy and seeing them dead.
“This was one of the first, fundamental examples that epigenetic therapies may be great anti-cancer drugs,” he said.
“Every global pharmaceutical company now has a pipeline for epigenetic drug discovery, and we have contributed to this.”
As a clinician scientist, he looks after patients with blood cancers, particularly acute leukaemia, and says scientists are able to understand what is driving cancer at a depth that was previously unimaginable.
A total of seven prizes were awarded at the ceremony. The main “Prize for Science” was shared by four recipients: Emeritus Professor David Blair, University of WA, Professor David McClelland and Professor Susan Scott from ANU, and Professor Peter Veitch from the University of Adelaide.
The prize for innovation was won by Professor Thomas Maschmeyer of Sydney University, while the prize for new innovation was won by Associate Professor Justin Chalker of Flinders University.
Physical scientists of the year prize went to Associate Professor Xiaojing Hao of the UNSW Sydney.
Two school teachers won prizes: Sarah Fletcher from Bonython Primary School, ACT and Darren Hamley from Willetton Senior High School, WA.
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