Australia is a very beautiful and unique place. I first went to Sydney in 1996 to present some research I had accomplished together with a much more brilliant and capable research physician. I was able to ride the monorail, now gone I’m told, and travel to the Outback, or at least the edge of it. My wife and the two oldest still at home at that time went there a few years ago, and it was still just as amazing, to hear them tell it.
Australia is like America squared. If everything is bigger in Texas, it’s definitely badder in Australia, where even the seashells can kill you. There are indeed a ridiculous number of dangerous creatures there. America has four venomous snakes, and Australia has more than one hundred on land and another thirty in the water. We have two poisonous spiders, and they have at least five, including the Sydney funnel-web, with enormous fangs.
Had I known this prior to visiting Australia, Sydney may not have seemed like such a good place to stay. Sydney and America share another commonality: we don’t like anyone telling us what to do, and we generally go our own way, with a stubbornness seldom seen elsewhere. This trait extends to medical science as well. When an Australian doctor found that a bacterium, H. pylori, caused stomach ulcers, he was ignored.
Dr. Barry Marshall did not take this well and prepared a broth of H. pylori, stuck an endoscope down his throat, and drank the broth. Three days later, he developed nausea, and his wife reported halitosis (they always do). The bacteria had blocked acid production, and on days five to eight, he experienced achlorhydric vomiting (no acid). On day eight, he put the scope back down, and there, for the world to see, was massive gastritis.
A simple biopsy confirmed the test results, and 21 years later, Dr. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with his longtime collaborator, Robin Warren. Another notable doctor in Australia is Professor Richard Scolyer. While some deadly creatures are unique to Australia, the cancer glioblastoma multiforme is not. This cancer, like all cancers, derives from normal brain cells, in this case, astrocytes.
Grade IV astrocytomas receive this name and are one of the worst types of cancer to have. It is aggressive, invasive, and resistant to most chemotherapy agents, though Avastin is often used, along with radiation therapy and surgery, if it has not metastasized too far. The median survival time is 12 to 15 months with treatment, with less than 5 percent surviving past five years. But GBM, as it’s known, may have chosen the wrong human being to attack this time.
Dr. Scolyer is a specialist in skin cancers, a desperately needed profession in Australia, with its bright sunny days and large population of transplanted pale people. Over the years, Dr. Scolyer and his team developed groundbreaking immunotherapies for one of the deadliest of skin cancers, melanoma. After saving many people’s lives in Australia and around the world, he started to develop headaches and nausea.
An MRI quickly confirmed the worst: glioblastoma multiforme, an almost certain death sentence, even with one tumor, as metastasis is almost certain. Those of us who loved ER will remember Dr. Greene taking his walk on the beach before succumbing to brain cancer. Dr. Scolyer decided not to go so quietly into that dark night. Instead, he put his considerable intellect and training to good use, developing a unique treatment for his cancer.
This involved training immune cells to recognize the cancer and administering a cocktail of medications to increase the effectiveness of the treatment. His colleagues felt that he should leave things to the neuro-oncologists, but he disagreed. With the help of a colleague, Professor Georgia Long, he became the first GBM patient to receive combination pre-surgery immunotherapy and then a vaccine personalized to his tumor markers.
When the tumor was excised, it was clear that the therapy had been effective, with the medications being found in the tumor cells and “an explosion of immune cells” attacking the cancer cells. GBM usually returns within six months, but eight months later, in February of 2024, his scans were clear, and today, a year later, they are still clear. Doctors who refuse to accept the status quo—Dr. Scolyer’s dedication to science and medicine did not just give him more years and the hope for a cure for this deadly disease. This discovery gives everyone around the world suffering from this and any other type of cancer hope also. It is important that in our “usual” medical practice and research, we always leave room for the exception in the practice of medicine. In Dr. Scolyer’s case, I hope that he also gets a trip to Stockholm. He’s earned it.
L. Joseph Parker is a research physician.
