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2024 Endowment Fund Grants: successful grant recipients

We are delighted to announce that twenty-four innovative Peter Mac cancer research projects have been awarded Peter Mac Foundation Grants thanks to the generosity of donors to the Foundation’s Permanent Endowment Fund.

In total $1.3m in seed funding has been awarded to kick-start these new cancer research projects with the potential to enable significant breakthroughs in our understanding of cancer to improve patient outcomes.

This year, we are also introducing two awards for the new investigators who received the highest scores through the rigorous peer review process.  

The awardees for the inaugural Foundation Grants Excellence in Innovation Award are Dr Emma Boehm in the clinical category and Dr Athena Jessica Ong in the laboratory category.

Congratulations to this year’s recipients:

Nenad Bartonicek - Preventing transcription-driven evolution of drug resistance 

Emma Boehm - Covering all bases: whole genome multi-omic analysis of circulating tumour DNA to understand temozolomide resistance in neuroendocrine tumours 

Julie Chu - Personalising Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy in Liver Cancers Through PET Quantification 

Meabh Cullinane - Co-designing a tool to measure impact of consumer involvement in clinical, governance and education activities @ Peter Mac 

Prue Cormie - Helping clinicians deliver the prescription every cancer patient needs – exercise 

Mathieu Gaudreault - Radiation therapy dose prediction with artificial intelligence for lung tumours 

Emily Gruber - Identifying the regulators of IRF4 in multiple myeloma 

Lisa Guccione - Advance Care Planning for Priority populations - using an impLementation science approach to support Uptake in oncology Settings: ACP – PLUS 

Thomas Handley - Crafting Customized mRNA Display Techniques to Revolutionize Theranostics 

Michael Harris - Understanding how air pollution increases breast cancer risk 

Joseph Hilton-Proctor - Development of P2X7 Radioligands for the Imaging and Therapy of Glioblastoma 

Megan Howard - Home-based photo-biomodulation for management of lymphoedema and radiation fibrosis in patients after head and neck cancer: a pilot RCT (HOME-PBM)

Erin Laing - Using artificial intelligence to measure low muscle mass as a predictor of sarcopenia in neuroendocrine tumours (NET) 

Helen Mohan - A Metagenomic Approach to Characterise the Role of Microbes in Pseudomyxoma Peritonei 

Chin Fen (Zoe) Neoh - Early diagnostic for Lomentospora prolificans and Scedosporium spp. infections in patients with blood cancers 

Dane Newman - Drug discovery screens for promoting immunotherapy-responsive T cells 

Hoang Linh Ngo - Identifying the circular RNA targets of oncogenic protein IGF2BP1 in solid cancers 

Athena Jessica Ong - Screening for druggable targets driving cell fate plasticity in NRF2-driven liver cancer 

Jo-Anne Pinson - Constraining peptides using an innovative platform for developing next generation theranostics for cancer diagnosis and treatment 

Jonathan Segal - Exclusive Enteral Nutrition for the treatment of immune checkpoint inhibitor colitis 

Niko Thio & Han Aw Yeang - Scaling End-to-end Multiplex Immunohistochemistry (mIHC) Image Analysis through an Automated Data Analysis Pipeline (i-ADAP) 

Anna Trigos - The future is in 3D: developing new workflows and computational methods to study cancer in 3D 

Scott Williams - Expanding the cytotoxic arsenal of CAR T cells with anticancer venom peptides 

Aaron K Wong – Optimising Opioid Treatment for Cancer Pain Using Precision Medicine 

Congratulations again to all of this year's recipients, and a big thank you to all of our incredible Endowment Fund donors who make it possible for us to provide seed funding to exciting and cutting edge cancer research projects like these.