Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the first of March.
I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Tanning represents your skin cells in trauma. The fact the skin is going darker means your skin is putting up a defense.
That's the message. This year's Joint Australian of the Year, Professor Georgina Long, wants you to know. She's a cancer doctor and was part of a medical breakthrough that transformed the way that we treat melanoma. While she's been focused on treating patients that have advanced skin cancer, she's very clear on what she thinks needs to change messaging about
tanning culture. In today's Deep Dive, I chat to the incredible twenty twenty four Australian of the Year her work in the melanoma field, as well as how her medical breakthrough is now being used to treat her best friend and co Australian of the Year recipient, Professor Richard Scollier. Before we get to that chat, Sam, it's making headlines.
There are calls for the identity of a former Australian politician who the ASIO boss says worked for a foreign spy group. ASIO Director General Mike Burgess said the unnamed person quote sold out their country party and former colleagues by agreeing to share knowledge from inside parliament in exchange for payments. All we know is that they are a former politician.
In Canberra, Australia and the Philippines have reached a new deal aimed at protecting joint security interests in the Asia Pacific. Speaking in Canberra, Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Junior said protecting the South China Sea was important for the preservation of regional peace. The countries have agreed to an new maritime
defense and cyber safety partnership. However, Green Senator Janet Rice pushed back on the president's address, accusing the Philippines leader of corruption and human rights abuses.
Donald Trump's name may not appear on the US state of Illinois's presidential ballot at its upcoming Republican primaries. On March nineteen, a judge ruled to disqualify Trump as a presidential nominee in the state over his involvement in the January sixth attacks on Washington, DC. A spokesperson for Trump's campaign however, said the former president will appeal the ruling immediately.
And the good news the Queensland state government is investing eighteen million dollars in funding for endometriosis and pelvic pain programs. Minister for Health and Women Shannon Fenterman, hopes the funding will improve the state's health system, which she said has seen women and girls dismissed and misdiagnosed. Georgina Long is
nothing short of remarkable. She's the comedical director of the Melanoma Institute Australia and this year she was named Australian of the Year alongside her friend and colleague, Professor Richard Scolia. Together with their teams, the pair have transformed the field of melanoma research and treatment and are responsible for saving
thousands of lives here in Australia. Both are clear in their messaging more needs to be done to prevent melanoma and that starts with reshaping how we talk about tanning in this country. A quick thing before we get into this chat, as I said. The Australian of the Year award was jointly awarded to both Georgina and Richard. Richard was actually diagnosed with incurable brain cancer last year, and now Georgina is treating him with the same breakthrough medicine
that changed the melanoma field forever. This chat you're about to hear is about her melanoma research, her hopes for the future, and what it's like to treat your best friend. Without further ado, here's Professor Georgina Long. Professor Long, thank you so much for joining us on the daily ours.
Thank you Zara for having me here.
I want to start with a bit about your work. Can you just tell me a bit about the work you've done in the area of melanoma cancer specifically.
I'm a medical oncologist, so I treat cancer with drug therapy. If you think of your immune system, your immune system is responsible for keeping the nasties away. You don't want your immune system to tack your own tissue, your good tissue, your organs, but you want it to attack all the nasties like viruses in bacteria and keep you healthy. So we try to get a person's own immune system to kill the melanoma cancer cells. The drugs we use activate the immune system in a very specific way to kill
cancer cells. So melanoma cancer was the first cancer to actually show that the modern immunotherapy's work, and I was part of that development of those drugs.
I am part of a generation that heard slip stop slap. You know, we heard that tanning kills. Why do you think that we are still having this conversation now? Why do you think that messaging hasn't cut through yet?
Tanning's massive problem. I think we have not educated our population well enough about the risks of the sun. We've also got to remember that the great campaign of the eighties slip stop slap, only really went for a decade, and that has not been rejuvenated or done again in a modern way. So we now have a whole bunch of teenagers and twenty year olds and even early thirty year old who did not learn about how dangerous sun
can be. Yeah, they had no hat, no play, but actually understanding the damage that UV or the sun can do and the risks is really not at the level it needs to be.
I wonder how much it comes up against these beauty standards that we have definitely perpetuated on social media. But there is this standard that we think that tan skin is something beautiful, something desirable. How does any marketing slogan or anything come up against that sort of standard.
It's a big mountain, but it can be done by using the very tool that created it. So we've got to use social media and we've got to just set a new standard. I mean, a great example is fashion. I'm old enough now to have seen jeans up high under the breast, slowed down almost.
The loose jeans five years ago. That would not have been a thing exactly.
All of these things are fashion and changeable. And that's what we can do with tanning. We did it with smoking, we do it with seat belts. In this country, we can do this.
We're speaking here about social media. You are now speaking to half a million young people. What is your message to the people watching this on the.
Daily os Tanning represents your skin cells in trauma. The fact the skin is going darker means your skin is putting.
Up a defense when the skin is getting darker. Scientifically, what is happening.
So in the layers of our skin, we have these cells called melanocytes. When the sun or UV hits our skin, those melanocytes are triggered to produce a pigment called melanin. That production of melanin is your skin saying I'm under trauma.
I need an armor.
The mistake that we make is that when your skin's making that armor, which is going a bit darker, is that that's healthy and then will protect us further. But it does not protect you from skin cancer. The fairer your skin is the higher risk. But I have a lot of brown eyed, brown haired people who think they have olive skin in my clinic.
And it's not just older people who you're seeing right. I believe that this is something that is also disproportionately affecting young people.
Every thirty minutes and Australian is diagnosed with a melanoma. Every six hours, somebody dies of melanoma. It used to be every four to five hours. We've changed that to every six hours by the drug therapies I mentioned before. Young people disproportionately are impacted by melanoma in Australia. Twenty to thirty nine year olds. Guess what the most common cancer is melanoma.
You have set a very lofty ambition to bring down those deaths to zero? How do you go about doing that?
We strategize on this with our faculty and we have a full big picture view of melanoma. We think of the full life cycle and you can do this for any cancer actually, So number one, what causes melanoma? That's prevention. What can we do in that space? You and i've just spoken about glamorization of tanning. Melanoma Institute Australia. Research has proved that sun beds cause melanoma. It was that research that got commercial sun beds banned in this country.
We've been speaking there about melanoma. But you were jointly awarded the Australian of the Year title with your colleague, and my understanding is also a very close friend, Professor Richard Scollier, and you've been using the work that you've done in the melanoma field to actually treat Richard who was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. Can you just talk me through what your work in that field has looked like to date.
You can imagine if you're being told you possibly have a brain cancer and you're a doctor and you know all about it, and you've looked at brain specimens many, many, many times throughout whole career, as Richard has, and you just know that this is going to be a bad one. You can imagine that you're just in a state of shock. At that point and your colleagues and friends like me, I was just grief stricken, literally howling with that physical pain.
You can't describe it until you've been through it. So we were speaking before about immunotherapy, using your immune system to kill cancer cells. When I get presented with someone with a bad melanoma that's spread everywhere, and I know when looking at the tissue, Richard will look at the tissue and then we'll analyze the tissue with our lab all the features that tell us this is going to be a bad one and it's going to be hard to get the immune system to recognize it and kill it.
What do I do then? What are the trials I've done? And I just applied those principles to Richard's humor. It was scary what I was suggesting. I had a lot of experience with melanoma. Richard and I, together with our colleagues, had pioneered using immunotherapy first before you remove melanoma surgically, and we'd show and that when you do that, you actually train your immune system better. So if you leave a lump of cancer and it's not a lot of
cancer for stage three melanomas, it's risky, risky melanoma. Normally we'd cut it out and the five years ago you just watch now we cut it out, give twelve months of immuno. But what we did is started using combination immuno early, just two doses, then cut it out. All of a sudden, we were seeing these incredible cures, and we were training the immune system better by giving the immune therapy first and then cutting out. But even better, you actually got to feed back to the patient in
the standard. If you cut a cancer out and they've got no more cancer that you can see on scans, but you think it's probably there microscopically, but you can't see it on scans, and then you mop it up with drug therapy. You don't know that you're successful. You only know you're unsuccessful. If it comes back right in this way, you give two doses, you cut it out, you actually see the response. And that's where Richard comes
in as a pathologist. He would then classify the response and into four different groups complete, near, complete, partial, or no response. I was enable to say to patients, hey, you've had a great response, you've had a major pathological response. Your cued basically your chance of it coming back is way less than five percent, whereas before we started I was telling you it was more than fifty percent. So it really did multiple things. We train hmmune system better.
Patients were doing better, but they actually got real time feedback within six weeks of diagnosis, and they love it. They love to know and if it's not successful, they love to know that because knowledge is power. Oh, it hasn't worked very well, let's change it up. You're going to need radiotherapy. That's only a local treatment. It'll stop it coming back in the place it was. But let's also use a different drug therapy afterwards. So that's where
we've really pioneered the treatment and the paradigm. It really shift the paradigm. So I applied that to Richard's tumor when he got back to Poland and I suggested it to him.
What did that conversation look like?
I mean, we cried together, so through tears, it's like, why don't we try this? Why don't we try this treatment? And Richard, I'm going to try and pick the drugs I think that are going to be the best for this tumor. I'm going to treat it like the worst of the worst melanoma, and that's what I did. We don't know yet how this will go long term for Richard.
He's fine now, but the odds are against him. The type Richard has, his survival is approximately fourteen months with the current standard treatment, and that treatment has not changed since two thousand and five. So when two cancer researchers are presented with that and you've just made all these changes in melanoma, you can't but help think, can't we
try something different? And that's why we came up with going with drug first, imminotherapy, delay the surgery, and as Richard said, people might focus on my survival, but it's that data that's incredible. This is a foundation, yea. Even if Richard doesn't survive, this is a founding thing to build upon. You're not going to make a light bulb by refining a candle. Don't keep doing what you did before.
You need to think completely differently, because even if these people don't survive, we learn for the next bunch of people, and Australians love to make a difference.
I think that's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much for your time, Professor, long Thank you, Sarah.
Thanks for joining us. On the Daily Odds today. If you want to support the work Georgina and the Melanoma Institute Australia are doing, you can donate at Melanomamarch dot org dot au. We're also going to throw that leak from that to today's show notes and if you learn something from today's episode, don't forget to hit follow. So there's a TDA episode waiting for you every weekday morning. We'll be back again on Monday morning. Have a wonderful weekends, stay safe and we'll speak soon.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalkudin 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 torrest Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.