Dr Siok Tey is fighting cancer with state-of-the-art technology modern methods
The second round of Metro North Clinical Research Fellowships is now open! Last year Dr Siok Tey was awarded one of give grants and since then has been able to enhance her research into cancer treatment.
Funding though the Clinician Research Fellowships is enabling Dr Tey and a team of scientists to work together with her clinical colleagues to conduct cutting edge research using cell and gene therapy to treat cancer and complications of cancer treatment.
“There is now a new form of cancer treatment using genetically modified immune cells. We are bringing to Metro North this treatment where we take immune cells out of the patients, genetically modify them in the lab so that they are better at killing cancer, and grow them up to millions and millions of cells,” Dr Tey said.
“We can then put these enhanced immune cells back into the patient so that they can kill the cancer.”
The time Dr Tey spends working as a clinician, enabled by the Fellowship, is a vital component of her research.
“For me, to bring what I develop in the laboratory and my scientific expertise into the clinical sphere, I have to work closely with the hospital because it is the clinical need that drives the research,” she said.
“Our research is very proximate to the patients, very clinically relevant. The Fellowship enables me to work closely with my clinical colleagues and the entire clinical team, and together we have made good progress on this big undertaking.”
“Hopefully we can start to treat our first patients within the next nine months. It sounds like a long way away but for this type of research, that’s how long it really takes to bring this to patients.”
Her paper for which she was the second author “Inducible apoptosis as a safety switch for adoptive cell therapy” published in 2011 in the New England Journal
of Medicine (NEJM) has been cited over 660 times with a field weighted citation impact score of 51.74. This same paper has been cited 76 times in patent literature.
