Professor Gavin Painter, from Victoria’s Ferrier Research Institute, is developing new immunotherapy treatments for cancer. These work by harnessing the body’s own immune system to fight the disease.

His work is part of an ongoing collaboration with immunologists at the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, based at Victoria.

Professor Painter says the notion of using the body's immune system to fight cancer is not new, but new clinical data is promising.

“Cancer immunotherapy can be traced back to experiments in the 1890s. But now immunotherapy approaches have been validated in the clinic, so it’s a really exciting field to be working in.”

In his talk, Professor Painter will discuss an approach from Victoria’s Ferrier Research Institute that combines natural molecules—such as fats, sugars and protein fragments—in precise orientations to retrain the immune system to reject cancer tissue.

“Through a synthetic chemistry approach, we can now design vaccines that induce potent responses from immune cells with more specificity and potency.”

Professor Painter will also discuss how cancer immunotherapy differs from traditional treatments such as chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, and how new vaccine technologies may be combined with traditional and other newly developing therapies.

Professor Painter's inaugural lecture is on Tuesday 19 April.