Southern Highlands Branch Meeting 2025-3

“Using Precision Medicine to Eradicate Childhood Cancer”

Associate Professor Mark Cowley
Deputy Director, Enabling Platforms and Collaboration
Children’s Cancer Institute

Date: Thursday, 17 April 2025, 6.30 – 7.30 pm AEDT
Venue: RSL Mittagong, Carrington Room
Entry: Members, $5; Non-members, $10 (please note: cashless payments only)
All are welcome

Summary: Cancer is the leading cause of disease-related death for young people (0-18) in the developed world, with 1000 newly diagnosed cases every year in Australia (400,000 worldwide), making this a significant health concern. Every child’s cancer is unique, making it difficult to work out the optimal treatment plan for each child, using existing clinical tests. At the Children’s Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, we have created the Zero Childhood Cancer Program, which is the world’s most comprehensive national-scale Precision Medicine program to tackle childhood cancer. We have shown that by deciphering the patient’s cancer genome in real-time (that is, identifying all of the genetic alterations that drive that patient’s tumour), and matching each patient to a specific targeted therapy, we can more than double survival in Australian children with the worst prognosis cancers. Now we are seeking to understand the benefits of Precision Medicine for all Australian and some NZ children with cancer.

In this lecture I will describe our innovative approaches to Precision Medicine, how this helps us understand the molecular basis of almost every tumour, and how this leads to better clinical outcomes. As I am a computational biologist, I will also touch on how we are harnessing Artificial Intelligence and new hybrid cloud computing technology to handle these massive, sensitive datasets.

Mark Cowley is the Deputy Director of the Children’s Cancer Institute in Sydney and leads the Computational Biology Group there. He is also an Associate Professor at UNSW Medicine and co-leads several significant initiatives, including the Luminesce Alliance Data Enabling Platform and the ACRF Childhood Cancer Liquid Biopsy Program. Known internationally for his expertise in genomics and precision medicine, Mark focuses on the rapid analysis of children’s cancer genomes to design personalised cancer care, a key component of the ZERO Childhood Cancer program. He also develops liquid biopsy diagnostic methods and novel data analysis approaches to enhance cancer treatment and research. Before joining the Children’s Cancer Institute in 2018, Mark spent 11 years at the Garvan Institute, where he developed bioinformatics methods for genomic medicine, particularly for rare genetic diseases and rare adult cancers.

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