Melanoma treatment pioneers joint Australians Of The Year

Written by: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Pioneers in melanoma treatment, professors Georgina Long and Richard Scolyer, are the joint 2024 Australians of the Year.

The Sydney-based professors are the co-directors of Melanoma Institute Australia, and their partnership is credited with saving thousands of lives.

Their work on immunotherapy, which activates the patient’s own immune system to fight the cancer, advanced melanoma from a fatal disease to one that is curable.

Around 18,000 Australians are diagnosed ^[1] with melanoma each year, with the cancer killing 1,300 people ^[2] a year. However the chance of death from melanoma has declined rapidly over the past decade.

Scolyer, 57, was diagnosed last year with incurable, stage four brain cancer. He made himself a guinea pig for high-risk treatment for brain cancer and, using the team’s melanoma breakthroughs, became the world’s first brain cancer patient to have combination immunotherapy before surgery.

Scolyer has now exceeded the median time for recurrence. “Still no recurrence of my supposedly incurable #glioblastoma!,” he wrote this week on his Facebook page ^[3], My Uncertain Path, where he publicly documents his cancer journey. “Median time to recurrence for all patients is 6 months; I’m now out to 8 months!”

Sculler told ABC’s Australian Story program, “Brain cancer doctors were so worried this would kill me quicker or result in terrible side effects. But so far so good.”

He said for him the medical decision was “not a hard decision to make when you’re faced with certain death. I’m more than happy to be the guinea pig to do this.”

Long told the program, “We’ve taken everything, absolutely every bit of knowledge … that we’ve pioneered in melanoma and we’ve thrown it at Richard’s tumour.”

The pair hope the lessons they’ve learnt from Scolyer’s treatment journey can inform future treatments for melanoma. Their goal is to eventually see the melanoma death toll fall to zero and to impact other cancers as well.

Long and Scolyer have also highlighted the need to design better clinical trials and ensure patient have greater access, as well as embedding more research into clinical care.

The 2024 Senior Australian of the Year, Yalmay Yunupiŋu, is a teacher, linguist and community leader from Yirrkala, Northern Territory.

Young Australian of the Year is Emma Mckeon, described as “the most successful Australian Olympian of all time”. At the 2020 Summer Olympics, she became the first female swimmer and 2nd woman in history to win seven medals in a single Olympics.

The Local Hero of the Year, David Elliott, is the co-founder of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum in Queensland. His discovery of a dinosaur fossil while mustering sheep in 1999 led to the revival of Australia’s palaeontology field and “the creation of a palaeo-tourism industry that put outback Queensland on the map.”