About Us

Research Overview

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 $100,000,000 of funding and published over 220 publications since 2017. The research group has steadily grown and currently includes over 30 core team members working in three distinct areas:

• Data Connect – 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.

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

• Clinical trials – we are currently running nine studies at varying stages of completion in general practice testing novel interventions covering cancer prevention, risk-based screening, pharmacogenomics, and early cancer diagnosis in primary care. We are also collaborating with other cancer survivorship trials through PC4.

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 such as Prof Mark Jenkins, the School of Medicine (Prof Finlay Macrae, Prof Ingrid Winship), and the Department of General Practice and Primary Care (Prof Dougie Boyle, Prof Lena Sanci, A/Prof 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. Similarly, the PARTNER program seeks to connect rural Australians to clinical trials through their local general practice, as well as identify support trials that are pertinent to the needs of rural Australians.

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, QMUL), the US and Denmark. Our group has long-standing ties with the Cancer in Primary Care (Ca-PRI) network and its annual conference that presents groundbreaking research in the sphere of cancer in primary care. In 2024, our group hosted the Ca-PRI conference in Melbourne, highlighting our commitment to driving innovation and improving cancer outcomes in primary care. 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. The cancer in primary care team has a history of collaboration with A/Prof Jo-Anne Manski-Nankervis based at NTU in Singapore. This is supported through the Primary Care Collaborative Cancer Clinical Trials Group (PC4) of which Prof Jon Emery is Director.

Funding