Eavesdrop On Experts

Twenty years ago, Professor Elizabeth Vincan set out to understand how cancer cells ‘talk’ to each other and the cells around them. Her research group was among a number to realise that some cancer cells always ‘switched on’ specific genes that function in an ancient form of cell-to-cell communication. And the idea was that if you could find out what these genes did, and block them, it could provide a new way to treat cancer. “At that time I was a young post doc mum and working where I was working was just too difficult because I had to go over the West Gate Bridge,” she says. So when a position came up at Western Hospital that suited her, she fell into cancer research. “The good thing about that is that I don’t actually have any formal cancer training, so when I address a question I come at it from a completely different tack. So that has been instrumental in the path that my career has taken,” Professor Vincan says. “What I realised way back in the late 1990s is that growing – a solid tumour, for examp