Professor Miles Prince
Peter McCallum Cancer Centre, VIC
Rotary Clubs of Glen Eira, Chadstone/East Malvern & Frankston Sunrise
Multiple Myeloma - 2010
Professor Miles Prince is Professor of Medicine at both Melbourne and Monash Universities and Director of the Centre for Blood Cell Therapies at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne and consultant haematologist at Cabrini Hospital, Melbourne.
He trained in Clinical and Laboratory Haematology in Melbourne and Sydney and completed his MD in Toronto, Canada examining gene transfer into myeloma cells for immunotherapy.
He has a very active research program involving clinical research and laboratory research – the latter involving stem cell research and cancer immunology. He has been involved in numerous clinical trials of new agents in myeloma and lymphoma including thalidomide, lenolidomide, bortezomib, VEGF inhibitors, retinoids, denileukin diftitox, monoclonal antibodies and histone deacetylase inhibitors.
He has published over 240 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 500+ abstracts/presentations, is a reviewer for numerous Journals, and a member of several Editorial Boards and Scientific Advisory Boards. He is the currently the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Myeloma Foundation of Australia.
SUMMARY OF PROJECT:
Identifying and targeting myeloma stem cells in a novel mouse model and in humans
Multiple Myeloma (MM) is a disease of cancerous plasma cells and although many inroads have been made into the treatment of the disease over the last few years, myeloma remains incurable. We believe that the major reason we do not have a cure is that we are unable to kill the myeloma stem cell – a very immature rare cell that exists within the cancerous population. The best analogy is that currently we are just ‘pulling out the weeds by breaking the stalks’ rather than pulling out the weed ‘by the roots’! If we could find effective therapies that kill the stem cell, we may be able to cure patients with myeloma.
One major limitation of us testing new drugs is that we need effective ‘models’ of the disease. The simplest way to test if new treatments are likely to be successful is to test them in a small animal model. However, for these models to be predictive of the human disease behaviour they need to recapitulate both the disease and the human cellular environment in which it grows. One problem to date has been the inability for mice to ‘accept’ the transplant of human cancer and so ‘immune –suppressed’ mouse models have been developed. These models allow engraftment of human malignancies into the mouse and so can be used to test standard chemotherapy approaches. However where they ‘fall-down’ is when a therapy requires an intact immune system for it to work. We are fortunate to have available to us the ‘Raghu’ mouse model that can overcome this problem.
This model maintains an intact immune system while the mouse develops myeloma. Dr Paul Neeson from our laboratory has travelled to Colorado to learn the techniques of this model and we are in the process of establishing this model in our laboratories. Part of this Project is to develop that model in the context of myeloma.
The crux of this Project is to further identify the myeloma stem cell, investigate it in the novel myeloma mouse models we have and then kill it with new targeted immune-based approaches.