From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Friday, November fifteenth. Australia must move faster to test DNA driven treatments and then make genomic personalized medicine part
of healthcare at every level. That's the plea for a health revolution from the nation's top scientists, doctors and patients, revealed today at the Australian dot com dou Today we're launching a big new frontier for our journalism, deep coverage of health, from the latest research breakthroughs to practical advice on everything from exercise to menopause, and deeply personal stories
like the one we're about to share. One of the most inspiring Australians around is Richard Scolier, the cancer professor who's turned his own brain tumor into a real time experiment in survival. The Australian's senior journalist, Tanzy Harcourt has spent the past thirteen years living with a brain tumor diagnosis of her own, and today we hear how patients like Tansy are responding to what they're calling the Scholiar effect.
For the people in Australia, living with brain tumors. This was massive news.
Professor Richard Scolia has saved thousands from a certain death sentence, yet he's just been handed his own. The world's leading melanoma pathologist has incurable brain cancer.
Glioblastoma is a rare and aggressive type of brain tumor that ravages tissue with devastating efficiency. All new cases are automatically classified as Grade four exceptions. Richard Scolia was named joint Australian of the Year for twenty twenty four. Alongside his friend and colleague, Professor Georgina Long. They've dedicated their
careers to fighting another type of cancer, melanoma. Moving swiftly past the initial shock of Richard's diagnosis, the pair channeled their expertise in immunotherapy into a world first treatment regime, with Scolia as the self described guinea pig. The big idea was to give immunotherapy before having surgery to remove the tumor, something that has been shown to work with melanoma.
And so this idea of giving iminotherapy before my tumor was debolked made total sense to me. So never been tried before with combination in minitherapy, but for me it felt like the right thing to do. Give it a crack, See if we can make a difference work I've learned from science that were see if this is something worth exploring.
Just like a vaccine, immunotherapy uses the body's own defenses to destroy cancer cells. Scholia is receiving the therapy in conjunction with conventional cancer treatment, and so far the results are promising. After a year, Scholia's MRI scans show no recurrence of the tumor. He's speaking here with Network seven.
I think it's amazing I'm still here, But it could just be luck that I'm only one patient, and some patients do survive for a long time in brain cancer. So ultimately we need a clinical trial that puts patients into different groups to see if this treatment actually works or not. Is it just a fluke that I happen to be alive, not related to the treatment.
Tanzy Harcourt is a business journalist with The Australian, and she remembers vividly hearing the news of Richard Scollier's diagnosis.
When which was diagnosed, I had a lot of people contacting me just because I have a brain tumor myself. I was diagnosed thirteen years ago now, and I don't have a glioblastoma. I have something that at the time was called an oligo astrocytoma. People reached out to me because anyone with a malignant brain tumor faces an uphill battle.
There's been very little developments in finding a cure for brain tumors, and he was just so public with what he was trying to do, which is something different to what has been done in the past.
Richard Scolia and his professional partner, Georgina Long are experts in melanoma and have pioneered amazing treatments for that kind of cancer. This was something new to them. How did they apply the lessons that they've learned in melanoma treatment to this globlastoma that Richard was facing.
There's a couple of things that they're doing that is a little bit different. The first, really significant thing is that he was treated before his surgery. Now, the reason why that is unusual in brain tumors is because most people, if they have a brain tumor, they've got pressure on the brain as a result of that, and so to reduce the pressure they need a surgery. So the surgery then is how they diagnose what kind of brain tumor it is. But it's also taking pressure off the brain,
which can be fatal. So in his case, he had a seizure when he was overseas and it wasn't putting so much pressure on that he needed to be operated on immediately. He was able to return to Australia and then, of course, because he's an expert in that field, they were able to come up with a new treatment protocol for him, give him that first and then have the surgery.
That's an unusual step and that's not something that is currently in clinical trials in Australia, I think maybe even anywhere in the world.
He's had a year of no reappearance of his globelastoma. That is wonderful news for Richard and his family, of course, but it's caused some mixed feeling among experts and also other people who are living with cancer. Can you talk a little bit about that. Why is that causing mixed feelings?
It's causing mixed feelings because or to start with, anyone that's dealing with a glier blastomer has a very bleak future under the current treatment protocols. So the idea of somebody that is so highly regarded coming up with a new idea and then being so public about it is creating an incredible amount of hope in the community, which is understandable. And the only problem with that, of course, is that one year doesn't necessarily indicate anything one way
or another. It could be that this treatment protocol is working, or it could be he had a really good reception, which means the surgery went really well. It could be the radiotherapy, or it might not work at all. It's actually just too early to tell, and he is clear about that in his book. He's clear about the fact
that it's too early to tell. But every time he expresses hope and relief when he has a good result, it's still there's just an outpouring of people that then want to do that as well for obvious reasons.
Is there an equity issue here too, where people may feel, if they are suffering something similar to Richard, for example, that they're not getting the same opportunities that he is, and if they are feeling like that, is that valid.
I think that there are a lot of people that are feeling like that. I've got two neuroncologists and one of them is also a Richard's neurooncologist, and I know that there's a lot of people that have been reaching out to their various specialists saying, we want to do that treatment, and they've even been reaching out to the Melanoma Institute of Australia, who's had to put something up
saying we don't treat brain tumors. So I think that people are perhaps feeling a bit panic that they're missing out, But the truth is that the various professionals need to have time to try and create a clinical trial that replicates the work that Richard and Georgina Long have done.
So they're producing a paper themselves and there are I think multiple processes underway at the moment where various specialists for neurooncology are trying to create a clinical trial, but you can't just kind of jump into it because obviously they're very risky and dangerous. And one of the issues with any of these things is that you can get pressure on the brain as a result of the drugs
that you're taking. So it's not the same as perhaps if you had a cancer somewhere else in your body and it swelled as a result of immunotherapy that wouldn't necessarily have as diet consequences as if it was inside the confined space of your skull.
Coming up, what's the balance between fear and hope when a story as big as Richard's school years comes along. This is just a taste of The Australian's new foray into deep coverage of health. Check it out at the Australian dot com dot au and we'll be back after the break. At The Australian, Tansy works for our Business
section as a senior journalist. She grills CEOs and CFOs about profits and balance sheets and corporate decision making, so she's very comfortable with charts and graphs, the numbers that tell us a bigger story. That's informed the way she's approached cancer as a story and as a human experience.
Look, I think I probably pestered my doctors more than they would like, because every time I go in for my six monthly scans, I always have questions. There might be one trial that's been tried here and something else that's come up there, and I always like to ask. The statistics are pretty bad, and the treatment protocols haven't changed all that much. Either at this point in time, right now, the best treatment is a really good brain surgery.
I've had two, a really good resection it's called and radiotherapy. So there are chemotherapy drugs, but they generally at this point in time are more helping in terms of quality of life rather than extending life.
They talk about the school your effect. What is that?
That's basically this idea and you alluded to it earlier that people want to have what he's doing because the work that he's done in Melanomah and Georgina. Obviously that's the reason why they were the Australians of the Year. This year has been so exciting and everyone thinks, well, if he's doing it, then it must be right, and hopefully he will be right. But it's just too early to tell that yet. So I think everyone kind of
hopes and crosses their fingers. But you can't have everyone jumping into what he's doing at this point in time.
Yeah.
So at the same time, here we have this beacon of hope for many people, and we also have frustration and maybe a bit of panic. As you said, how do you think ultimately we'll look back at the balance of those two things Is this a moment where we take a big leap forward or is it a lot of pain for a lot of people.
My suspicion is that it will be both. I think immunotherapy has so far proven to be the main area where there are breakthroughs in cancer treatments, So I think that hope is important, and I think it's pretty likely that he's on the right track. But whether or not it's going to be soon enough for him or anyone
that's even currently diagnosed, I don't know. The other thing that I think is really important to draw attention to is just the fact that he's done such a good job of talking about his story that it's raising awareness of brain tumors and that in turn helps raise money for research into brain tumors because it's quite an expensive business. There is that mixture of hope and possibly disappointment and anxiety for everyone, but hopefully he's going to nail it first go.
Well.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you.
Tanzy Harcourt is a senior reporter with The Australian. You can read her story at Beaustralian dot com dot au. Thanks for joining us this week on the front. Our team is Kristin Amyot, Tiffany Dimak, Jasper leik Leat, Sam mcglou, Joshua Burton, Stephanie Coombs and me Claire Harvey