In total $1.24m in seed funding has been awarded to kick-start these new cancer research projects with the potential to advance cancer research and care.

The twenty-four projects were selected through a rigorous peer review process.

Each project aligns with Peter Mac’s Strategic Directions (2020-2025) and demonstrates the potential to improve health outcomes for people who are at risk of cancer, have cancer or have previously received treatment for cancer.

We are very grateful to the generous individuals who make these annual Grants possible through their gifts to the Foundation's Endowment Fund.

Congratulations to this year’s recipients:

Alice Bergin
Understanding the breast cancer outcome disparity in First Nations women: does disease biology contribute?

Kara Britt
Optimising low-input ChIP-seq analysis on transcription factors

Catherine Devereux
Partnering with consumers to address a “wicked problem”: Enabling end of life conversations between people with cancer and their clinicians.

Abby Douglas 
Radiolabelled-siderophore PET/CT for the diagnosis of invasive pulmonary aspergillosis: a pilot study

Cuong Duong
Exploring the use of activity-based fluorescent probes to target oesophageal cancer

Katie Fennell
Establishing a versatile screening tool to identify novel regulators of plasticity in breast cancer

Michelle Gerstman 
The impact of inflammation and pharmacogenomics on opioid pharmacokinetics and analgesic response in patients having cancer surgery

Sofya Golenkina & Callum Dark 
Identification of biomarkers of cancer-associated cachexia using live human tissue samples

Clare Gould
Novel strategies to predict and monitor response to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

Tony Huang 
To investigate the impact of dLN-homing on CAR T cell fitness and positioning using CRISPR-engineering and VISIUM spatial transcriptomics

Lev Kats
Epigenetic therapy for multiple myeloma

Meinir Krishnasamy 
“This is Me” - Strengthening the voice of older adults with cancer in multidisciplinary treatment decision making. A feasibility implementation study

Aishwarya Kulkarni
Investigation of first in class Hippo pathway targeted therapies

Annette Lim 
Defining immunotherapy resistance mechanisms in cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas.

Susanne Ramm
Development of "Imaging Transcriptomics": A collaborative initiative to enable the integration of high throughput sequencing and imaging in 2D and 3D in vitro models

Aparna Rao
Understanding how glucose fuels the growth and spread of melanoma

Kevin Sek 
Fine-tuning adenosine receptor subtype 1 (A1R) CAR T cells to enhance anti-tumour function and effector differentiation against solid tumours

Karen Sheppard 
Understanding why some melanomas respond and others don't to immunotherapies

Laure Talarmain 
Investigating the role of the Amyloid Precursor Protein in normal and malignant haematopoiesis

Ben Teh 
A sero-suvey to investigate immunity and immune response to vaccine preventable infections in the early post autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplant period

Mei Tran 
A single-arm feasibility study of a group-based telehealth cognitive behavioural therapy program for insomnia in Vietnamese-speaking cancer survivors

Ilia Voskoboinik 
How to curb the cytokine release syndrome in patients undergoing CAR T cell immunotherapy

Madeline Webb 
Hippocrates' humors revisited: Does Bile imbalance regulate Cancer-Associated Cachexia?

William Hamilton 
Proteomic screening of spliceosomal mutations in myelodysplastic syndromes