Dr Omar Elaskalani would love to one day see chemotherapy treatment for peadiatric cancer patients replaced with immunotherapy.
The senior research scientist at the Kids Research Institute Australia and UWA medical school’s research focus is on age-specific immunotherapy for paediatric cancers.
Dr Elaskalani said just like the male bias that has existed within medical research, a similar bias exists for children.
‘We overlook age as well, so we make treatments for adults, and we assume children are just small adults,” he told Medical Forum.
Except, he said, in many ways they are very different, especially in their immune system.
Dr Elaskalani has been working on trying to develop a new immunotherapy for childhood cancer as part of a project started in February 2021.
“Most treatments, most drugs are for adults and once they are proven safe, they take them and apply them to children,” he said.
“So basically, our project is working at trying to adapt immunotherapy to childhood immune cells.”
Immunotherapy treatment for cancer has been used on adult cancer patients for more than a decade.
“It basically stimulates your immune cells to go and attack cancer cells,” Dr Elaskalani explained.
However, he said clinical trials in peadiatric cancer had mostly failed.
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“We think this failure is mainly because the immune cells in children and adults behave very differently,” he said.
“An example of this is during COVID-19, where you have a child of five or six years old getting viral infection and not having any symptoms, and in the same household you can have an adult with COVID infection, but with severe symptoms.”
Dr Elaskalani said the differences between how adult and child immune cells behave in cancer were not well known.
He said work so far had led his team to hypothesise the immunotherapy treatments they were using could be effective across a range of different paediatric cancers.
“We discovered the same type of immunotherapy can be very effective in leukemia, which is a blood cancer, and in sarcoma, so completely different kinds of cancer, but they can actually be treated with very similar treatment if you work in the immune system,” Dr Elaskalani said.
His team is currently studying how cancer cells in peadiatric mice interact with immune cells in order to inform the development of peadiatric-specific immunotherapies.
So far, the research has identified specific immune cells that behave very differently between adults and children.
“By changing the maturation of these immune cells to become more adult-like we managed to cure a lot of these cancers in mice. So now we want to continue doing this work in clinical trials.
“We only do it for a very short time during treatments. And after this, after the cancer has gone, these immune cells can reverse back to their child-like form,” he said.
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So far, the most common side effect of this treatment has been the onset of Cytokine release syndrome, an acute systemic inflammatory response, which he said was not a chronic issue and could be treated in the clinic.
He said if chemotherapy was to be replaced with effective immunotherapy, there would be better long-term outcomes for children who survived childhood cancer.
“Childhood cancers are mainly treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy, which can be effective – 85% of kids survive – however, it’s highly toxic. 60% of kids who survive have a lot of chronic health issues.”
Dr Elaskalani recently received a $100,000 grant from a $6.8million pool of WA state funds as part of the WA Near Miss Awards: Ideas Grants and Emerging Leaders programs for 2024-2025.
While he welcomed the funding, which allows research to continue until the end of 2025, he said if government funding was more consistent it would better support long-term research projects, like his.
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