Sarah was juggling a career in hospitality with life as a young mum to a one year old girl, always on the go and not giving much thought to her own body. When a pain returned after she stopped breastfeeding, she put it down to a previous bout of mastitis and expected it to pass with home remedies, just as it had before.
It didn’t. An ultrasound came back clear, but the symptoms kept getting worse, and by the time she saw a specialist she had stage 4 HER2-positive breast cancer. Despite a mastectomy and months of chemotherapy, the cancer had already spread to her spine and could not be removed.
Professor Nikki Verrills and her team are working to change that. Using tools like the CellenOne analyser, they can examine individual cells within the tumour, helping the team to predict how a patient will respond to different treatments, and finding ways that would allow the patient to respond more effectively to a personalised therapy.
This novel approach provides a new therapy pathway that could bring hope to women who don’t respond to traditional breast cancer treatments, and who right now, are left with few or no effective options.
Women like Sarah are relying on these researchers to uncover the next medical breakthrough. Your generous donation can help us help those who have been diagnosed with life-threatening and debilitating conditions like breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and endometriosis, enabling the lifesaving ideas of our researchers to improve care and outcomes for those in our community and beyond.
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