Cancer in Primary Care

The Primary Cancer Research Group was established at the University of Melbourne in 2013 and has become the biggest primary care cancer research team in the world. The team has accrued over $30,000,000 of funding and published over 160 publications since 2018. The research group has steadily grown and currently includes over 30 core team members working in three distinct areas:

*Data linkage – linking primary care data to hospital and clinical cancer registries to study the  patterns of care and impacts on patient outcomes, as part of a Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC) Alliance research program.

*Clinical trials – we are currently running nine randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in general practice testing novel interventions covering cancer prevention, risk-based screening, pharmacogenomics, and early cancer diagnosis in primary care.

*Primary care trial infrastructure and capacity building – the Primary Care Collaborative Cancer Clinical Trials Group (PC4) and PARTNER national trial networks.

The evolution and growth of the team reflects the success in obtaining competitive research funding through effective national and international collaboration, and development of effective teams to execute research.

At a local level, the Primary Care Cancer Research Group has built strong collaborations with researchers from the School of Population and Global Health (Mark Jenkins, John Hopper), the School of Medicine (Finlay Macrae, Ingrid Winship), and the Department of General Practice (Jo-Anne Manski-Nankervis, Dougie Boyle, Lena Sanci, Patty Chondros). These collaborations have been critical to build programs on cancer genomics and risk-based prevention, creation of critical data infrastructure for data linkage and trials, and development of decision support tools.

Nationally, we work closely with research teams at the University of Western Australia, University Technology Sydney, University of Queensland, University of Sydney, Flinders University, and others. Many of these collaborations have been built through the successful engagement and processes established by PC4 (see below).

Internationally, we have a long-standing collaboration with researchers at the University of Cambridge as part of our program on cancer risk assessment and early detection. This led to our group being the Australian lead on the £5 million Cancer Research UK Cantest program, creating opportunities for our team to attend international research schools on early cancer diagnosis and develop collaborations with groups in the UK (Cambridge, UCL, Exeter, Oxford), the US and Denmark. Jon Emery and PC4 were approached to help establish primary care cancer networks in SE Asia, led through a collaboration at NUS in Singapore. The SPRINT (Singapore) and Asia Pacific Primary Care Cancer Research Group have been established and have led to collaborations on several Australian and Asian grants involving early and mid-career researchers. This is supported through the Primary Care Collaborative Cancer Clinical Trials Group (PC4) of which Prof Jon Emery is Director.

PC4- The Primary Care Collaborative Cancer Clinical Trials Group

PC4 is funded by Cancer Australia to support the development of high-quality cancer research in primary care. Our Group provides an infrastructure to foster collaboration between researchers, health care practitioners, policy makers and consumers. We provide access to expert advice and resources through our Support Services, and build research capacity with our Training Awards, Workshops and Mentoring Programs.  Further information about becoming a member of PC4 and learning more about ways to support your research is provided on the trial group’s website.

PARTNER

The PARTNER network is a national rural practice-based research network (PBRN) that connects rural Australians to potential clinical trials through their local GP. PARTNER creates an environment of research-ready GP practices that improves the efficiency and quality of trials conducted in primary care. PARTNER uses technology solutions to support identification of eligible patients for trials, for disease surveillance and trial follow-up.

For more information, please see: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/bringing-clinical-trials-to-regional-patients.

Prof Jon Emery and his team have long-standing collaborations with researchers around the world in primary care, cancer, psychiatry, genomics, and linked data. These include a program of work with Prof Fiona Walter now at Queen Mary University of London (Wolfson Institute of Population Health) and formerly at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, Dr Chad Bousman at the University of Calgary on the PRESIDE trial, and Dr Juliet Usher-Smith at Cambridge on the CanRisk program. Additionally, The  CanTest program, co-led by Prof Fiona Walter and Prof Willie Hamilton encompassed 42 collaborators from 11 institutions around the world with a focus on early cancer detection in primary care.  Current studies within this collaboration include SCRIPT, CRISP, IC3, CanRisk and the Melatools programme.

Other collaborators include: