Discovery Circle project gaining momentum

Since being selected as the Discovery Circle Award winner in July, Dr Elyse Page has been making strides in her mission to improve the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in children.

With the ultimate aim of enabling earlier interventions and more tailored, less toxic therapies, Dr Page is leading her team in the pursuit of identifying a disease signal capable of predicting which patients are at risk of developing ALL in the central nervous system (CNS).

“By integrating this biomarker into the national screening pipeline, we can generate individualised risk profiles for every patient,” Dr Page said.

“Armed with this information at the time of diagnosis, we aim to significantly reduce the number of children who experience relapse with CNS-ALL and ultimately pave the way for healthier, brighter futures for children battling this disease.”

Dr Page is utilising a portion of the funding to bring First Class Honours graduate, Luke Quinlan, on board to focus on targeted therapies for CNS disease in leukaemia patients.

“With his interest in metabolomics, Luke will play a pivotal role in integrating our multi-omics data and will bring invaluable expertise to validating our candidate biomarkers in the lab,” Dr Page said.

“Using innovative cell models, his work will be crucial in advancing our research and uncovering new insights.”

Mr Quinlan says he’s grateful to work on a research project alongside Dr Page.

“I’m currently developing a novel cell system that replicates the CNS environment to explore metabolic changes for advancing the diagnosis and treatment of this challenging aspect of ALL,” he said.

The team has also commenced patient recruitment and sample collection, to establish a dataset for biomarker discovery.

"Each child’s treatment should be as effective and gentle as possible, and that’s what we’re striving towards," Dr Page said.

The project will continue through to mid-2025. More information on SAHMRI’s Discovery Circle initiative is available here.