When I was an intern in Ireland I worked in urology and saw a lot of patients with prostate cancer. Patients in Ireland at that stage often presented with quite advanced disease. They were often incurable and were managed palliatively with hormonal treatment. I liked the endocrine medicine side of things, and I liked treating men, because I found them very easy to talk to and relate to.
Then I came to Australia and spent a couple of years in general surgical training. I was looking to get into urology and a research job opportunity came up to work at Royal Melbourne Hospital.
A lot of my focus is on developing better care for patients with prostate cancer through translational science activities. Our group has been working in that space for 15 years. The current research is using genomics to discover why some prostate cancers progress, and some don’t. We are trying to reduce unnecessary treatment. We have funding from the Victorian Medical Research Acceleration fund and matched philanthropic funds for a clinical trial we hope will start by the end of the year at Western Health and Royal Melbourne Hospital.
All our VCCC Alliance Research and Education Leads are leaders in their fields. They are united by an ability to identify deficiencies in clinical pathways and a desire to change things for the better.
When you want to get things done, having the weight of the VCCC Alliance behind you gives you a bit more authority to move things. It increases your visibility and makes it easier to raise funds, get grants; there are a lot of things you can leverage.
Five years from now I’d like to see that the alliance has influenced greater harmonisation in standards of care, data collection, and for clinical units involved in clinical trials to act as a single entity rather than individual hospitals. That would be the dream.
When I did my PhD, I developed a compound that we thought was going to be useful in prostate cancer. We did a phase one study. Then we found it might actually be useful in Alzheimer’s disease. It has been in a phase 2 study in Alzheimer’s, it’s now in a phase 2 study in fronto temporal dementia. I have experienced, first-hand, research move from discovery to clinical application. Whether this compound actually gets approved as a therapy or is shown to be useful is a different story. But it’s been an interesting journey.
Associate Professor Niall Corcoran is a Urological Surgeon at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Principal Research Fellow in the University of Melbourne’s Department of Surgery, and VCCC Alliance Research & Education Lead, Genito-urinary Cancer.
