Below the Belt Award
Mitchell Lawrence — 2025
Using a living biobank to prioritise new treatments for penile cancer
Many people have never heard of penile cancer, because it is relatively rare. Yet, penile cancer can be disfiguring and life threatening, especially if it invades other tissues. If this happens, the current treatment is a combination of chemotherapies, but this is not very effective, and there has been little improvement in this approach for a decade.
The slow progress in developing new treatments for penile cancer is compounded by the limited amount of research. New cancer treatments usually undergo thorough testing in the laboratory before entering clinical trials. This is not happening for penile cancer, because it is severely under-represented in large international collections of living cancer samples. We want to change this.
Our goal is to develop a living biobank for penile cancer – the first of its kind in Australia – and use it to accelerate the development of new clinical trials.
We will:
1- Collect fresh cancer tissues, generously donated by patients
2- Turn life-threatening tumours into new tools for penile cancer research
3- Treat tumours with a library of promising therapies that can rapidly enter new trials. Unlike most biobanks, which store non-viable tissues, our collection will contain actively growing cancer cells (known as organoids). This will enable us to simulate clinical trials in the laboratory. We will also share these samples with laboratories in Australia and overseas, amplifying the worldwide efforts in penile cancer research.
This project is designed to benefit people with penile cancer who need chemotherapy. Currently, only a third of patients’ tumours respond. Our living biobank of penile cancer samples will be an enduring resource to identify new treatments across diverse tumours. This addresses a longstanding bottleneck in the pipeline of developing, testing and delivering more treatment options for penile cancer.
The slow progress in developing new treatments for penile cancer is compounded by the limited amount of research. New cancer treatments usually undergo thorough testing in the laboratory before entering clinical trials. This is not happening for penile cancer, because it is severely under-represented in large international collections of living cancer samples. We want to change this.
Our goal is to develop a living biobank for penile cancer – the first of its kind in Australia – and use it to accelerate the development of new clinical trials.
We will:
1- Collect fresh cancer tissues, generously donated by patients
2- Turn life-threatening tumours into new tools for penile cancer research
3- Treat tumours with a library of promising therapies that can rapidly enter new trials. Unlike most biobanks, which store non-viable tissues, our collection will contain actively growing cancer cells (known as organoids). This will enable us to simulate clinical trials in the laboratory. We will also share these samples with laboratories in Australia and overseas, amplifying the worldwide efforts in penile cancer research.
This project is designed to benefit people with penile cancer who need chemotherapy. Currently, only a third of patients’ tumours respond. Our living biobank of penile cancer samples will be an enduring resource to identify new treatments across diverse tumours. This addresses a longstanding bottleneck in the pipeline of developing, testing and delivering more treatment options for penile cancer.
