Jack Taylor explains the widespread problem of multidrug resistance in cancer treatment and how his PhD is contributing to the solution.
Jack Taylor says his UTS Master of Pharmacy really opened his eyes to the possibilities of a career in the pharmaceutical industry. “I got the opportunity to do some industry placements and saw a much wider variety of career paths than I imagined previously,” he says.
“I really enjoyed the research component of my masters, so starting my PhD was an easy decision. I had also already worked with Mary Bebawy, my PhD supervisor, on a piece of research during my masters and knew we’d work well together.”
Jack’s PhD is focused on the issue of multidrug resistance, a widespread problem in not just cancer therapy but treatments for other diseases and conditions too.
“Cancer multidrug resistance is a phenomenon where you treat patients with a certain chemotherapeutic drug, and then, after a time of remission, they come back for another round of treatment and suddenly the cancer is resistant to not only the drug you treated them with, but other drugs that are completely different,” explains Jack. “This can obviously have dire repercussions for patients.”
Professor Mary Bebawy runs the Cancer Cell Biology and Therapeutics Laboratory in the Graduate School of Health and says Jack’s research is important to the lab’s overall objectives.
“Our primary aims are to understand the role of extracellular vesicles (specifically microvesicles or large extracellular vesicles) in driving cancer biology; and to translate that knowledge into novel anticancer therapies and diagnostics,” she says.
Microvesicles are shed from the surface of cancer cells and researchers know they play an important role in driving cancer multidrug resistance, metastasis and evasion of the immune response but don’t know exactly how they are formed by cancer cells.
I’m trying to figure out how these microvesicles are formed and how they transmit chemotherapeutic multidrug resistance to other cancer cells.
“The research Jack is doing is helping us understand the cellular mechanisms driving the production of these vesicles in cancer cells. As a result, we can identify cancer selective proteins and pathways involved in the process which can lead to the identification of new druggable targets to treat cancer cells specifically, without impacting on normal healthy cells,” continues Mary.
According to Jack, the potential benefits of this research are twofold. Firstly, it will benefit the scientific community. “This is a relatively new field and there is lots to learn because microvesicles have functions in normal cells too. Understanding how they work is of great importance to other researchers,” he explains.
“The second potential benefit is that it will go some way towards improving cancer patient outcomes in the long term.”
Three years into his project and Jack is very pleased with his progress. “We’ve discovered discrete pathways exist in cancer cells compared to non-cancerous cells, and we’ve discovered that normal cells secrete microvesicles through alternate pathways which differ from those in cancer cells,” he explains.
“This is very encouraging for future drugs that will need to target cancer cell vesicle production but leave the non-cancerous cells unencumbered.”
With his PhD finishing up in the middle of the year, Jack is starting to scope out job opportunities. “I want to continue doing research, but I’m not sure in what capacity yet. I’ve got a couple of industry mentors who are helping me explore the possibility of going into an industry setting, but staying in academia is a good option too,” he says.
“My main problem is that I have too many interests and directions I could go in, but that’s certainly not a bad problem to have.”
