Explaining the latest cancer breakthrough

Already, and this is the Daily This is the Daily. Ohs oh, now it makes sense.

Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Saturday, the twenty second of February.

I'm Zara, I'm Emma, and it's that time of the week, Zara, where we pause reflect, talk about the joyful moments from the news cycle that you might have missed this week.

Our favorite time of the week.

Our favorite time of the week.

And we're kicking things off today with a story I didn't think we would be including in this podcast.

I know, a story about cancer treatment.

I know.

I do want to say it's very rare and very strange to be talking about cancer treatment in a good news podcast, But I think that's what makes this story so incredible. And what has happened is that this week there were results from a clinical trial that were published, and those results proved that the majority of melanoma patients whose disease had spread to their brains could essentially be cured with a new treatment plan.

This is huge breakthrough, right, huge.

Breakthrough, and what are the first breakthroughs we've had in this field in so long? So just to delve into what the findings were, the results found that in using this combination immunotherapy, and this is something that Professor Georgina Long, who was the former Australian of the Year. We chatted to her on this podcast before. This is something she's

This is the treatment that some people might be familiar with in the conversation around Professor Richard Scollier, a co Australian of the Year exactly who pioneered with Georgina Loong the melanoma treatment of this similar nature.

And then together or through sort of.

Georgina Lung's work, they trialed this combination immunotherapy on Richards Golia's tumor exactly.

And I think just to go to the heart of why this story matters so much. You know, you hear a good news story about a cancer treatment and sometimes it can.

Be quite obscure.

But just to really ground why this is such a big story. Australia has the highest melanoma rates in the world, there's one person diagnosed with the disease every thirty minutes, and there's one person dying every six hours. Then, to delve deeper into this cohort, brain metastases are present in between thirty and forty percent of patients at diagnosis with stage four melanoma and those are the type of patients

That is so scary. But as you mentioned, rarely we see breakthroughs.

I know, it's kind of a field and now there's hope for the very first time. And to Georgina Long, she said, we are now confident that these patients are cured, a term not used lightly in cancer. I received a media release about this new research and the title was quite amazing. It said, from just sixteen weeks survival to long term disease control, and I think, you know again,

Exactly, and that combination therapy that you've spoken about there, Zara, is the same type of approach that Georgina Long has used to treat Richard Scollia. So he doesn't have a brainchimmer connected to melanoma, but it's the success of that type of therapy that has been applied to his own treatment. Okay, so, Zara, we are next moving on to Mardi Grass celebrations. The parade is upon us.

It is It's been a year, I know, but yes, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade will light up Sydney's Oxford Street next week. This year, the slogan of Marti Gras is free to Be, and the Mardi Gras organization said that the theme is an important celebration of the strides made towards LGBTQIA plus equality, while also acting as a global reminder that our fight is far

Zara, we always see, of course, the Marti Gras celebrations culminate in this parade, but it's an annual kind of festival of advocacy and events and celebrations more broadly, over a period of a few weeks.

I have a very important event to talk to you about.

Oh well, thank you, that's what I was getting to.

Okay, So next Friday there's going to be what's called the biggest Vogue Ball.

In the Southern Hemisphere. Yeah, you know what a Vogue ball is.

This is the cissy Ball, right.

Talk to me about it.

This event.

I highly recommend you keep your eye out for footage of this from social media if you can't attend yourself. It is such a celebration of brilliance, of queer joy. Basically, if I had to describe it in a couple of sentences, just think about like the most impressive poses, strutting, dancing.

Well, that's where vogue comes from, Right, you're voguing, posing like you're in a magazine.

Yeah. It's like a battle of excellence on the catwalk. And we see just like costumes, personalities, drag queens, performers, all kinds of amazing people from within the community who come across the country to battle it out.

And honestly, the hype in the room is electric.

Well there you go.

So the Vardi Gras Festival will wrap up on Saturday, the first of March with that parade that we know so well. The ABC is predicting that more than twelve thousand people will march and dance down Oxford Street, so make sure not to miss that next Saturday. Now, em I want to throw the mic to you to explain a story that you told me about earlier this week that I thought was just an incredible scientific discovery.

Talk me through the pods in the airport in Texas.

Yeah, okay, well I have a good round three words there.

Yeah, the turbine pods.

You didn't think we would be talking about today, But there is this airport in Texas. It's in Dallas, the Dallas love Field Airport, and they started this trial in twenty twenty three where they developed these turbine pods.

They kind of look like pinwheels, you know, those little.

Toys that you might have had as a kid, kind of tiny wind turbines.

I guess.

They trialed this at the airport's control tower with a prototype which captured energy from the takeoff and landings of planes.

Razy, so there is so.

Much wind generated during takeoff and landing at airports. And the team that developed these had the clever idea that you know, all of that wind could be harnessed and converted into electricity. So there was a successful trial where they used that power for charging stations inside the airport for people to charge you know, phones.

Laptops, devices.

Over ten thousand devices were charged in the year of that trial, and now they are installing permanently dozens of these pods across the airport to develop six charging stations inside the airport where passengers can charge the devices, and the hopes are that they will create more and more of those stations, harness more and more energy, and that renewable energy will be used.

Across other sources.

I think it's a really clever innovation and you know, hopefully inspires other airports to maybe do the same.

So so smart.

Speaking of scientific breakthroughs, a very clever team of researchers in Victoria have discovered the oldest known fossil.

Of a mega raptorid.

Of course, of course, a mega raptorid we know is a kind of carnivorous dinosaur. So that has been discovered in Victoria alongside the first evidence of another kind.

Of dinosaur in Australia.

It's amazing to me that after all these yeah we find, we're still finding discoveries from the Cretaceous period.

So if you are struggling.

To imagine what a mega raptor might look like, they are a type of raptor. If you've seen Jurassic World, the raptors that Chris Pratt's character trains.

Just like a very stereotype I'm looking at it now, very stereotypical looking dinosaur.

Yeah, in the kind of t rex vibe, like the tiny arms, very scary, long powerful legs, long tail. Anyway, these fossils were discovered on the coast of Victoria by the Museum's Victoria Research Institute and monash Uni PhD student Jake Kotevski. Now it's believed they were formed up to one hundred and twenty one million years ago. That's nearly sixty million years before the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

But race copproaches. The other fossil discovered.

This new one that I mentioned is called a carcer rodontosaur.

Don't take my word on pronunciation.

But the best part of podcast is that no one can fact check us in real time like you have to let us know in the comments if we've pronounced.

Just talk about me behind my bag like the normal person.

But this dinosaur is essentially a great white shark with legs, absolutely terrifying. But it's the first time something of this nature has been discovered and so exciting for that to be happening on Australian shores. The fossils of a really important insight into Victoria's ancient ecosystem, into the age of the dinosaurs globally, and the research team have called this discovery groundbreaking.

Now, m I do want to finish on some homegrown talent and that is because the Matilda's star that we all know and love, Mary Fowler, has become the first player in the Women's Super League history to record at least two goal involvements. Don't know what that means, yep, Neither it means scoring or assisting in the scoring of a goal. So helping to set it up in some way yep. Mary Fowler did that four games in a row at least twice.

Now.

She set up two goals in her side's four nil win against Liverpool earlier this week and she dies for Man City, she does, and that allowed for her to set the record, with her coach crediting her as a vital element in Man City's prospects this season. And I just think that to see the continued success of Australian sportswomen and especially overseas where it's such a competitive league, there is so much talent and yet we'd have our very own coming through the middle and absolutely killing it.

There are so many amazing Matilda's players that play in that English woman's Premier League and if you want more Matilda's excitement, they are in the US at the moment playing in the She Believes Cup, and it's so exciting just to see that momentum from the twenty twenty three World Cups still paying off with how interested Australians are in their success in getting around them internationally.

But given this is a Good News podcast, we won't talk about the results against Japan.

Yes exact, we'll just leave that one. You can find that yourself.

It not the podcast for it's the time, not the place.

That wraps up another week of the Good News Podcast.

Thank you so much for joining us, and we will be back on Monday morning as normal with the day's deep dive. But until then, have a wonderful weekend.

My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcuttin woman from Gadighl country.

The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations.

We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.