An Australian, Dr Clare Weeden, has been awarded a fellowship and will return to Australia to set up a lab focusing on lung cancer, particularly in non-smokers.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in Australia and about 25% of lung cancers occur in people who have never smoked.
“I am fascinated by how the air we breathe imprints upon our lung and may influence later disease,” says Weeden.
The type of cancer more commonly found in non-smokers is called EGFR-driven lung cancer after the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Mutations in the EGFR gene can predispose cells to divide more rapidly and become cancerous. Weedon and her colleagues also found that EGFR mutations are common in healthy lungs but are kept in check by the body. Such non-cancerous cells with these mutations are referred to as dormant.
In 2023, Weeden and colleagues at the Crick Institute in London published these findings in Nature.
The authors also looked at 33,000 cases of EGFR-driven lung cancer in three different cities across the globe and found a significant association with air pollution.
But unlike the chemicals found in cigarettes, which directly damage DNA, air pollution appears to cause cancer in a different way.
“We discovered that air pollution triggers an inflammatory response from lung macrophages [white blood cells], which in turn ‘awakens’ these previously dormant cells to form lung cancers,” Weeden told Cosmos.
Now, Clare has been brought back to Australia with a $1.25 million CSL Centenary Fellowship, which identifies rising medical researchers each year. The award is granted over five years to help recipients establish a medical research lab in Australia.
Weeden will establish her lab at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne where she will continue to pursue early detection and intervention of lung cancer.
“Now that we know a little bit about one mechanism by which these cancers form, we could identify signals of these early stages to stratify at-risk patients, and in the future, therapies to curtail the outgrowth of these cells into tumours.”
These interventions will become increasingly important as 99% of the world’s population is exposed to air pollution above The World Health Organization’s safety guidelines.
“The nature of the challenges our lung cells face is also changing,” says Weeden. “A hundred years ago, our cities suffered from pollution from burning coal… Today, with climate change, our lungs face new challenges from, for example, bushfire smoke. We need to understand the effects of these pollutants on lung cells and how we can mitigate these effects.”
