Matt Dun has devoted his career to researching the rare and most fatal of childhood cancers including acute myeloid leukaemia and diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (known as DIPG), a paediatric brain cancer. Dun’s young daughter died of DIPG, a disease which is almost always fatal within a matter of months. As Professor of Paediatric Haematology and Oncology Research at Newcastle University in NSW, Dun has a team of 26 researchers mostly working on ways to prolong the lives of children with DIPG.
“The information and the knowledge have exponentially increased since I was tragically flung into this world in 2018,” he says, “but we’re not quite there yet in terms of how we can improve long-term or meaningful survival.”
He sees the children and young adults dying from the disease as an “acute, aggressive, uncompromising tragedy”. When his daughter was diagnosed, little was known about how DIPG formed and developed. He has worked hard to change that, coping with a professional life defined by a stream of deathly-ill children and young adults and their distraught families.
“Brave families frequently give consent to donate specimens from their child for both diagnosis and research,” he says. It is gently explained to families of children with DIPG that while there is hope the biopsy may help inform treatment decisions, it also contributes to vital research for a future cure.
A global leader in this field and Associate Editor of Neuro-Oncology, the leading journal in brain cancer research, Dun is confident of future progress. “Over the next three or four years, we’ll see multiple therapies used in sequence that will offer better outcomes than what patients currently face,” he says.
A finalist in the Emerging Leadership category of the Australian Financial Review’s Higher Education Awards, Dun, now 47, has three young children, in addition to his daughter Josephine who passed away. He says his early career in the Australian Navy helped shape his approach to team structure and taught him how to balance hia demanding workload of administration, leadership, and scientific research.
“I’ve got an amazing team, and we’ve built an amazing structure where we have individual postdoctoral scientists who help guide PhD students directly, and then there’s a pipeline of the way things are funnelled to me,” he says.
Various team members now manage different aspects of the lab’s operations, allowing Dun to remain focused on the essential research. “We’ve had to structure the group very deliberately to make that possible,” he says. “There was a significant period of my career when I was doing everything myself, and it just wasn’t sustainable, particularly with a group this big, but I think we’ve found a good balance now.”
Most of the team’s researchers are studying DIPG brain cancer, but a few are at work on a particular type of childhood leukaemia which has a one-in-two survival rate over the long term.
Awarded a $2 million grant this year by the National Health and Medical Research Council, Dun and his colleagues will continue to study DIPG tumours, as well as working on ways to use immune cells found in the patients’ spinal fluid and blood to determine which treatments are most effective.
“The tumour in the brainstem communicates with the rest of the body and alters how immune cells behave,” Dun says. “We’ve got some fantastic work, hopefully to be published by the end of the year, that shows patients with DIPG actually have fewer cancer-fighting immune cells in their blood. As a result, they’re more susceptible to infections throughout their treatment journey, which also has consequences on the disease course.”
Some of the drugs the team-members are studying in clinical trials can reverse that to a certain extent, he adds, noting this might help with monitoring drug response and stratify certain patients into different immune therapies.
Dun is a driving figure in a major clinical trial spanning the US, Australia and Europe. In this trial, he explains, patients receive a drug before the tumour biopsy. This helps researchers to measure how much of the drug is absorbed by the tumour, assess how the tumour responds at a molecular level, and correlate those findings with changes in the patient’s blood. “By linking all of this to patient outcomes, including survival, we hope to understand not just if the drug reaches the tumour, but whether it’s making a meaningful difference,” Dun says.
He and his team are building a deep learning–driven landscape of data to identify which drug combinations are most effective, and in which sequence they should be given, to give patients the best possible chance at long-term survival.
“We’re seeing meaningful signals in the data,” he says. “Children are still dying within two years, but there’s a subtle shift, a small but real extension in the time from diagnosis to death. It might only be a few months, but it’s the first change in survival we’ve seen. Now the focus is on building on that progress.”