"Brain cancer is confined to the organ that makes us who we are, and when it goes wrong, the effects are devastating – it eats away at our personhood.”
Professor Michael Brown, Centre for Cancer Biology in South Australia
"We need a paradigm shift away from chemotherapy and radiation."
Professor Michael Brown was well into his career when he first turned his research toward brain cancer.
After specialising in both medical oncology and clinical and laboratory immunology, a South Australian research grant requiring a focus on diseases with poor prognosis led him to glioblastoma – the most common and deadliest brain cancer. He joined Brain Cancer Australia's National Consortium of leading experts not long after – in 2018.
“Brain cancer is an awful disease,” says Michael. “It’s confined to the organ that makes us who we are, and when it goes wrong, the effects are devastating – it eats away at our personhood.”
As the Head of the Translational Oncology Laboratory at the Centre for Cancer Biology in South Australia, Michael was motivated to look for new treatments for glioblastoma because “the current treatment is not at all satisfactory.”
Around the same time, a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine described a complete – though temporary – response to CAR-T cell therapy in a patient with recurrent glioblastoma. “That was a striking finding, and the report energised the field,” he recalls. “It made me think seriously about bringing CAR-T cell therapy into brain cancer trials.”
He was already completing the first Australian CAR-T cell trial in patients with solid cancer including melanoma when he turned to apply the same technology in brain cancer patients. He leads the trial for adults with recurrent glioblastoma at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. His colleague Professor David Ziegler at Sydney Children’s Hospital runs another study for children with a rare tumour known as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). “We make the CAR-T cell products in Adelaide for patients in both trials,” he explains.
Measuring the impact is still evolving. “The best outcome would be to see clearer improvement than what we’re seeing now,” Michael explains.
“We’re picking up some activity in the blood and on MRI, but it’s difficult to interpret.” His team is now incorporating FET-PET imaging — a way to assess tumour viability more directly — into the next protocol amendment. “That will give us a better handle on how effective the therapy really is, because MRIs alone don’t tell the full story.”
For Michael, progress comes through persistence. “We need a paradigm shift away from chemotherapy and radiation,” he says. “My hope is that experimental therapies like CAR-T cells can gain a greater foothold.”
He's also committed to colllaboration and sharing resources — something that he says is absolutely necessary because of Australia's small, widely distributed population.
“That’s the advantage of an organisation like Brain Cancer Australia — it can draw people together across the country, sharing techniques, tissue samples and knowledge to advance the field.”
Read more about Michael's work, his CAR-T cell research, and the progress of his current trials.
