Speaker 1: Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Speaker 2: Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 3: Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday,
Speaker 3: the first of March.
Speaker 2: I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Speaker 1: Tanning represents your skin cells in trauma. The fact the
Speaker 1: skin is going darker means your skin is putting up
Speaker 1: a defense.
Speaker 3: That's the message. This year's Joint Australian of the Year,
Speaker 3: Professor Georgina Long, wants you to know. She's a cancer
Speaker 3: doctor and was part of a medical breakthrough that transformed
Speaker 3: the way that we treat melanoma. While she's been focused
Speaker 3: on treating patients that have advanced skin cancer, she's very
Speaker 3: clear on what she thinks needs to change messaging about
Speaker 3: tanning culture. In today's Deep Dive, I chat to the
Speaker 3: incredible twenty twenty four Australian of the Year her work
Speaker 3: in the melanoma field, as well as how her medical
Speaker 3: breakthrough is now being used to treat her best friend
Speaker 3: and co Australian of the Year recipient, Professor Richard Scollier.
Speaker 3: Before we get to that chat, Sam, it's making headlines.
Speaker 2: There are calls for the identity of a former Australian
Speaker 2: politician who the ASIO boss says worked for a foreign
Speaker 2: spy group. ASIO Director General Mike Burgess said the unnamed
Speaker 2: person quote sold out their country party and former colleagues
Speaker 2: by agreeing to share knowledge from inside parliament in exchange
Speaker 2: for payments. All we know is that they are a
Speaker 2: former politician.
Speaker 3: In Canberra, Australia and the Philippines have reached a new
Speaker 3: deal aimed at protecting joint security interests in the Asia Pacific.
Speaker 3: Speaking in Canberra, Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Junior said protecting
Speaker 3: the South China Sea was important for the preservation of
Speaker 3: regional peace. The countries have agreed to an new maritime
Speaker 3: defense and cyber safety partnership. However, Green Senator Janet Rice
Speaker 3: pushed back on the president's address, accusing the Philippines leader
Speaker 3: of corruption and human rights abuses.
Speaker 2: Donald Trump's name may not appear on the US state
Speaker 2: of Illinois's presidential ballot at its upcoming Republican primaries. On
Speaker 2: March nineteen, a judge ruled to disqualify Trump as a
Speaker 2: presidential nominee in the state over his involvement in the
Speaker 2: January sixth attacks on Washington, DC. A spokesperson for Trump's
Speaker 2: campaign however, said the former president will appeal the ruling immediately.
Speaker 3: And the good news the Queensland state government is investing
Speaker 3: eighteen million dollars in funding for endometriosis and pelvic pain programs.
Speaker 3: Minister for Health and Women Shannon Fenterman, hopes the funding
Speaker 3: will improve the state's health system, which she said has
Speaker 3: seen women and girls dismissed and misdiagnosed. Georgina Long is
Speaker 3: nothing short of remarkable. She's the comedical director of the
Speaker 3: Melanoma Institute Australia and this year she was named Australian
Speaker 3: of the Year alongside her friend and colleague, Professor Richard Scolia.
Speaker 3: Together with their teams, the pair have transformed the field
Speaker 3: of melanoma research and treatment and are responsible for saving
Speaker 3: thousands of lives here in Australia. Both are clear in
Speaker 3: their messaging more needs to be done to prevent melanoma
Speaker 3: and that starts with reshaping how we talk about tanning
Speaker 3: in this country. A quick thing before we get into
Speaker 3: this chat, as I said. The Australian of the Year
Speaker 3: award was jointly awarded to both Georgina and Richard. Richard
Speaker 3: was actually diagnosed with incurable brain cancer last year, and
Speaker 3: now Georgina is treating him with the same breakthrough medicine
Speaker 3: that changed the melanoma field forever. This chat you're about
Speaker 3: to hear is about her melanoma research, her hopes for
Speaker 3: the future, and what it's like to treat your best friend.
Speaker 3: Without further ado, here's Professor Georgina Long. Professor Long, thank
Speaker 3: you so much for joining us on the daily ours.
Speaker 1: Thank you Zara for having me here.
Speaker 3: I want to start with a bit about your work.
Speaker 3: Can you just tell me a bit about the work
Speaker 3: you've done in the area of melanoma cancer specifically.
Speaker 1: I'm a medical oncologist, so I treat cancer with drug therapy.
Speaker 1: If you think of your immune system, your immune system
Speaker 1: is responsible for keeping the nasties away. You don't want
Speaker 1: your immune system to tack your own tissue, your good tissue,
Speaker 1: your organs, but you want it to attack all the
Speaker 1: nasties like viruses in bacteria and keep you healthy. So
Speaker 1: we try to get a person's own immune system to
Speaker 1: kill the melanoma cancer cells. The drugs we use activate
Speaker 1: the immune system in a very specific way to kill
Speaker 1: cancer cells. So melanoma cancer was the first cancer to
Speaker 1: actually show that the modern immunotherapy's work, and I was
Speaker 1: part of that development of those drugs.
Speaker 3: I am part of a generation that heard slip stop slap.
Speaker 3: You know, we heard that tanning kills. Why do you
Speaker 3: think that we are still having this conversation now? Why
Speaker 3: do you think that messaging hasn't cut through yet?
Speaker 1: Tanning's massive problem. I think we have not educated our
Speaker 1: population well enough about the risks of the sun. We've
Speaker 1: also got to remember that the great campaign of the
Speaker 1: eighties slip stop slap, only really went for a decade,
Speaker 1: and that has not been rejuvenated or done again in
Speaker 1: a modern way. So we now have a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of teenagers and twenty year olds and even early thirty
Speaker 1: year old who did not learn about how dangerous sun
Speaker 1: can be. Yeah, they had no hat, no play, but
Speaker 1: actually understanding the damage that UV or the sun can
Speaker 1: do and the risks is really not at the level
Speaker 1: it needs to be.
Speaker 3: I wonder how much it comes up against these beauty
Speaker 3: standards that we have definitely perpetuated on social media. But
Speaker 3: there is this standard that we think that tan skin
Speaker 3: is something beautiful, something desirable. How does any marketing slogan
Speaker 3: or anything come up against that sort of standard.
Speaker 1: It's a big mountain, but it can be done by
Speaker 1: using the very tool that created it. So we've got
Speaker 1: to use social media and we've got to just set
Speaker 1: a new standard. I mean, a great example is fashion.
Speaker 1: I'm old enough now to have seen jeans up high
Speaker 1: under the breast, slowed down almost.
Speaker 3: The loose jeans five years ago. That would not have
Speaker 3: been a thing exactly.
Speaker 1: All of these things are fashion and changeable. And that's
Speaker 1: what we can do with tanning. We did it with smoking,
Speaker 1: we do it with seat belts. In this country, we
Speaker 1: can do this.
Speaker 3: We're speaking here about social media. You are now speaking
Speaker 3: to half a million young people. What is your message
Speaker 3: to the people watching this on the.
Speaker 1: Daily os Tanning represents your skin cells in trauma. The
Speaker 1: fact the skin is going darker means your skin is putting.
Speaker 3: Up a defense when the skin is getting darker. Scientifically,
Speaker 3: what is happening.
Speaker 1: So in the layers of our skin, we have these
Speaker 1: cells called melanocytes. When the sun or UV hits our skin,
Speaker 1: those melanocytes are triggered to produce a pigment called melanin.
Speaker 1: That production of melanin is your skin saying I'm under trauma.
Speaker 3: I need an armor.
Speaker 1: The mistake that we make is that when your skin's
Speaker 1: making that armor, which is going a bit darker, is
Speaker 1: that that's healthy and then will protect us further. But
Speaker 1: it does not protect you from skin cancer. The fairer
Speaker 1: your skin is the higher risk. But I have a
Speaker 1: lot of brown eyed, brown haired people who think they
Speaker 1: have olive skin in my clinic.
Speaker 3: And it's not just older people who you're seeing right.
Speaker 3: I believe that this is something that is also disproportionately
Speaker 3: affecting young people.
Speaker 1: Every thirty minutes and Australian is diagnosed with a melanoma.
Speaker 1: Every six hours, somebody dies of melanoma. It used to
Speaker 1: be every four to five hours. We've changed that to
Speaker 1: every six hours by the drug therapies I mentioned before.
Speaker 1: Young people disproportionately are impacted by melanoma in Australia. Twenty
Speaker 1: to thirty nine year olds. Guess what the most common
Speaker 1: cancer is melanoma.
Speaker 3: You have set a very lofty ambition to bring down
Speaker 3: those deaths to zero? How do you go about doing that?
Speaker 1: We strategize on this with our faculty and we have
Speaker 1: a full big picture view of melanoma. We think of
Speaker 1: the full life cycle and you can do this for
Speaker 1: any cancer actually, So number one, what causes melanoma? That's prevention.
Speaker 1: What can we do in that space? You and i've
Speaker 1: just spoken about glamorization of tanning. Melanoma Institute Australia. Research
Speaker 1: has proved that sun beds cause melanoma. It was that
Speaker 1: research that got commercial sun beds banned in this country.
Speaker 3: We've been speaking there about melanoma. But you were jointly
Speaker 3: awarded the Australian of the Year title with your colleague,
Speaker 3: and my understanding is also a very close friend, Professor
Speaker 3: Richard Scollier, and you've been using the work that you've
Speaker 3: done in the melanoma field to actually treat Richard who
Speaker 3: was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. Can you just talk
Speaker 3: me through what your work in that field has looked
Speaker 3: like to date.
Speaker 1: You can imagine if you're being told you possibly have
Speaker 1: a brain cancer and you're a doctor and you know
Speaker 1: all about it, and you've looked at brain specimens many, many,
Speaker 1: many times throughout whole career, as Richard has, and you
Speaker 1: just know that this is going to be a bad one.
Speaker 1: You can imagine that you're just in a state of shock.
Speaker 1: At that point and your colleagues and friends like me,
Speaker 1: I was just grief stricken, literally howling with that physical pain.
Speaker 1: You can't describe it until you've been through it. So
Speaker 1: we were speaking before about immunotherapy, using your immune system
Speaker 1: to kill cancer cells. When I get presented with someone
Speaker 1: with a bad melanoma that's spread everywhere, and I know
Speaker 1: when looking at the tissue, Richard will look at the
Speaker 1: tissue and then we'll analyze the tissue with our lab
Speaker 1: all the features that tell us this is going to
Speaker 1: be a bad one and it's going to be hard
Speaker 1: to get the immune system to recognize it and kill it.
Speaker 1: What do I do then? What are the trials I've done?
Speaker 1: And I just applied those principles to Richard's humor. It
Speaker 1: was scary what I was suggesting. I had a lot
Speaker 1: of experience with melanoma. Richard and I, together with our colleagues,
Speaker 1: had pioneered using immunotherapy first before you remove melanoma surgically,
Speaker 1: and we'd show and that when you do that, you
Speaker 1: actually train your immune system better. So if you leave
Speaker 1: a lump of cancer and it's not a lot of
Speaker 1: cancer for stage three melanomas, it's risky, risky melanoma. Normally
Speaker 1: we'd cut it out and the five years ago you
Speaker 1: just watch now we cut it out, give twelve months
Speaker 1: of immuno. But what we did is started using combination
Speaker 1: immuno early, just two doses, then cut it out. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden, we were seeing these incredible cures, and
Speaker 1: we were training the immune system better by giving the
Speaker 1: immune therapy first and then cutting out. But even better,
Speaker 1: you actually got to feed back to the patient in
Speaker 1: the standard. If you cut a cancer out and they've
Speaker 1: got no more cancer that you can see on scans,
Speaker 1: but you think it's probably there microscopically, but you can't
Speaker 1: see it on scans, and then you mop it up
Speaker 1: with drug therapy. You don't know that you're successful. You
Speaker 1: only know you're unsuccessful. If it comes back right in
Speaker 1: this way, you give two doses, you cut it out,
Speaker 1: you actually see the response. And that's where Richard comes
Speaker 1: in as a pathologist. He would then classify the response
Speaker 1: and into four different groups complete, near, complete, partial, or
Speaker 1: no response. I was enable to say to patients, hey,
Speaker 1: you've had a great response, you've had a major pathological response.
Speaker 1: Your cued basically your chance of it coming back is
Speaker 1: way less than five percent, whereas before we started I
Speaker 1: was telling you it was more than fifty percent. So
Speaker 1: it really did multiple things. We train hmmune system better.
Speaker 1: Patients were doing better, but they actually got real time
Speaker 1: feedback within six weeks of diagnosis, and they love it.
Speaker 1: They love to know and if it's not successful, they
Speaker 1: love to know that because knowledge is power. Oh, it
Speaker 1: hasn't worked very well, let's change it up. You're going
Speaker 1: to need radiotherapy. That's only a local treatment. It'll stop
Speaker 1: it coming back in the place it was. But let's
Speaker 1: also use a different drug therapy afterwards. So that's where
Speaker 1: we've really pioneered the treatment and the paradigm. It really
Speaker 1: shift the paradigm. So I applied that to Richard's tumor
Speaker 1: when he got back to Poland and I suggested it
Speaker 1: to him.
Speaker 3: What did that conversation look like?
Speaker 1: I mean, we cried together, so through tears, it's like,
Speaker 1: why don't we try this? Why don't we try this treatment?
Speaker 1: And Richard, I'm going to try and pick the drugs
Speaker 1: I think that are going to be the best for
Speaker 1: this tumor. I'm going to treat it like the worst
Speaker 1: of the worst melanoma, and that's what I did. We
Speaker 1: don't know yet how this will go long term for Richard.
Speaker 1: He's fine now, but the odds are against him. The
Speaker 1: type Richard has, his survival is approximately fourteen months with
Speaker 1: the current standard treatment, and that treatment has not changed
Speaker 1: since two thousand and five. So when two cancer researchers
Speaker 1: are presented with that and you've just made all these
Speaker 1: changes in melanoma, you can't but help think, can't we
Speaker 1: try something different? And that's why we came up with
Speaker 1: going with drug first, imminotherapy, delay the surgery, and as
Speaker 1: Richard said, people might focus on my survival, but it's
Speaker 1: that data that's incredible. This is a foundation, yea. Even
Speaker 1: if Richard doesn't survive, this is a founding thing to
Speaker 1: build upon. You're not going to make a light bulb
Speaker 1: by refining a candle. Don't keep doing what you did before.
Speaker 1: You need to think completely differently, because even if these
Speaker 1: people don't survive, we learn for the next bunch of people,
Speaker 1: and Australians love to make a difference.
Speaker 3: I think that's a beautiful note to end on. Thank
Speaker 3: you so much for your time, Professor, long Thank you, Sarah.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us. On the Daily Odds today. If
Speaker 2: you want to support the work Georgina and the Melanoma
Speaker 2: Institute Australia are doing, you can donate at Melanomamarch dot
Speaker 2: org dot au. We're also going to throw that leak
Speaker 2: from that to today's show notes and if you learn
Speaker 2: something from today's episode, don't forget to hit follow. So
Speaker 2: there's a TDA episode waiting for you every weekday morning.
Speaker 2: We'll be back again on Monday morning. Have a wonderful weekends,
Speaker 2: stay safe and we'll speak soon.
Speaker 1: My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda
Speaker 1: Bunjelung Kalkudin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges
Speaker 1: that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the
Speaker 1: Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest
Speaker 1: Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the
Speaker 1: first peoples of these countries, both past and present.