No walls here – a remarkable vision

To “realise the promise of personalised medicine for cancer patients by creating a world-renowned facility, ‘without walls’, where research findings move quickly into clinical care and clinical challenges drive laboratory research”. This was the stated goal of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and St Vincents & Mater Health Sydney in creating the city’s Kinghorn Cancer Centre. Located within the St Vincent’s Research Precinct in Darlinghurst, Sydney, the new cancer treatment facility “builds on a long-standing and well-developed integration of research and clinical care, collaborating to provide national leadership in translational research and the development of personalised medicine approaches to cancer”. Translational research is defined as “research focusing on the bridge between basic laboratory research findings and application to settings involving patients and populations”. Personalised medicine, meanwhile, “combines knowledge of the underlying biology of a cancer, and unique physiological aspects of a patient, to determine the most appropriate treatment for that person”.

Directly driving research

The Kinghorn Cancer Centre will allow clinical challenges to directly drive laboratory research and enable research findings to be rapidly translated into clinical applications for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer patients. The Garvan Institute is helping to generate new paradigms in cancer research that keep pace with the exponential growth of knowledge and current international best practice. This facility is unique in providing a comprehensive “bench to bedside” research paradigm. The diagnosis and treatment of cancer is quite different from conventional medical approaches. Cancer itself is complex, and treatment outcomes are heavily influenced by each patient’s unique physiology. Traditional approaches to cancer care in Australia have not widely incorporated the benefits of a multi-disciplinary approach to implementing personalised medicine. “Personalised medicine relies on the detection of biomarkers to aid patients and clinicians in the process of clinical decision-making. These can be biomarkers of the presence of cancer, the likelihood of outcome, or response to therapy. Collectively, these biomarkers are called diagnostics.” – The Garvan Institute and St Vincents & Mater Health Sydney. Unlike a “comprehensive cancer centre”, the focus of the Kinghorn Cancer Centre is not on coordinating the care of a large volume of patients, but on the combination of the fundamental science (molecular biology) of cancer and strong clinical interactions, leading to the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics, and the delivery of holistic and individualised cancer care. Holistic and individualised cancer care balances all aspects of each patient’s life in delivering personalised diagnosis, therapy, and treatment, and providing for the quality of life needs of each individual, both in treatment and after treatment. Patients at the Kinghorn Cancer Centre will be directly involved in the research and decision-making process. As patients become more informed and aware of the multiplicity of treatment options, this knowledge can be disseminated more widely to families and consumers.