This is an email sent frm Juliette @ Flinders Medical Research Centre to the team that cycled through a very wet and muddy Vietnam in 2009
Hard to believe it was nearly a year ago!
I am writing now to update you on how the money raised from your trip has been spent. We had initially thought we would be funding one year of a PhD project exploring using calcium to kill prostate cancer cells, however a new PhD project has come up which is equally as exciting and we are able to fund it in full.
The Foundation has been funding for the past few years research which is showing that low doses of radiation, such as those you might get from an xray or from air travel, can actually help prevent cancer rather than cause it. Doses at that level have been shown to activate defences within normal cells which can actually help to kill cancer cells, and protect against further radiation exposure.
The aim of the two-year project your money is going towards is to determine if low doses of radiation can remove pre-tumour prostate cells and therefore prevent prostate cancer forming, in addition to or in replacement of androgen ablation therapy. If successful, the team here hopes low dose radiation therapy could be used to prevent prostate cancer from ever reaching the stage of metastatic disease.
The research will be led by PdD student Mark Lawrence, we would invite you out to Flinders on the morning of Friday the 20th August to meet Mark and hear more about what your funds have achieved. Tristanne is also eager to put faces to the names she got to know last year”
