Colorectal cancer (CRC) commonly known as bowel cancer is the second most common form of cancer in Australia and the third most common cancer world-wide. Other than its costs to human health, CRC presents a huge financial burden. In Australia, it costs at least 1 billion dollars per year to try to treat this disease. This year alone, it is predicted that 17,000 Australians will be diagnosed with CRC and 4,000 Australians will succumb to this disease. The majority of people who die from bowel cancer, die because the cancer metastasizes and spreads to the liver (late stage CRC). This increases the patient’s mortality rate from 30% to 70%. Critically, patients who have undergone surgical removal (resection) of liver metastasized-tumours will most-likely (90%) re-develop liver metastasis. What’s even more alarming is that the incidence of young people (age 20-39) being diagnosed with CRC has been increasing by 1-2% per year since 1990. Patients diagnosed with CRC at a young age (<55) are 58% more likely to be diagnosed with late stage CRC than older people. At present, there are no effective tools to predict a CRC patient’s risk of developing liver metastasis and for liver-resected CRC patient’s risk of re-developing liver metastasis. Current treatments are insufficient in controlling CRC once it has metastasized. Thus, there is an urgent clinical need to (1) define improved diagnostic markers for metastatic CRC to reduce death rates by identifying metastasizing cancers earlier and to (2) identify improved treatments that can prevent the spread of CRC to the liver and treat existing liver metastasis.

My research addresses these needs by studying the immune system present in the tumour with the goals of:

1. Identifying distinct tumour-infiltrating immune cells with prognostic capacity for CRC liver metastasis and survival.

2. Characterizing these novel tumour-infiltrating immune cell subsets by advanced proteomic and transcriptomic approaches.

3. Understanding how these immune cells shape tumour progression.