When it comes to childhood cancer, the stakes are heartbreakingly high and the treatment options, especially for aggressive forms, are often devastatingly limited. For Dr Deborah Meyran, this reality is not just unacceptable, it is a plight that needs addressing and an immediate call to action – and Deborah is on a mission to change that.
Blending her roles as a clinician and researcher, Deborah is working on transforming care and improving treatment options for children with cancers that are difficult to treat. A paediatric oncologist at The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) and researcher at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Deborah’s work focuses on improving and creating new treatments for children with high-risk solid tumours, cancers like sarcoma and neuroblastoma. These types of cancers currently have very few treatment options when they return or spread.
Funded by generous philanthropic support, Clinician Scientist Fellowships provide the opportunity to combine clinical experience with research, with the goal of improving care and health outcomes for children and young people and driving innovation in clinical care. As a recipient of one of these Fellowships and fuelled by her mission to change the survival odds for children with aggressive cancers, Deborah is working to develop innovative therapies that could offer hope to some of our most vulnerable children and their families.
This Fellowship enables her to undertake research that seeks to tackle three critical challenges in childhood cancer – speeding up immune recovery after stem cell transplants, studying children’s tumours to better understand how they evade immune surveillance, and improving the effectiveness of CAR-T cell therapy in solid tumours.
“CAR-T cells are a form of immunotherapy where a patient’s own immune cells are reprogrammed to find and attack cancer cells. They’ve worked really well in blood cancers like B-cell leukaemia, but in solid tumours, the immune system often can’t reach and eliminate the cancer effectively. That’s exactly what we’re working to change,” explains Deborah.
Part of her critical and potentially life-saving work involves designing new generations of CAR-T cells that are more powerful and persistent, and testing them in combination with drugs that make the tumour environment more permissive to immune attacks.
The second major focus as part of her Fellowship is improving immune recovery for children after stem cell transplants, as they often face months without a functioning immune system. Deborah is helping lead a new trial platform to test ‘Pro-T cells’, lab- grown young T cells to rebuild a child’s immune system faster – from more than a year to around three months – reducing their risk of infection and relapse. In promising signs, she is already working toward an early-phase clinical trial to bring these innovative approaches to children at the RCH.
Originally from France, Deborah moved to Melbourne in 2017 to pursue research in cancer immunotherapy – further reinforcing the RCH’s ability to attract the best and brightest minds in paediatric healthcare and future leaders in clinical research. Now a mother of three and a dual clinician-researcher, Deborah says the Fellowship has been life-changing.
“As a paediatric oncologist, I’ve seen the incredible courage of children and families facing devastating diagnoses. Their strength inspires me to find safer and more effective treatments, so every child has the chance to grow up and live a full life beyond cancer. This Fellowship gives me something truly precious, dedicated time to focus on research over the next five years, which is incredibly rare,” she said.
“To the donors who made this possible: thank you / Merci. Your support means the world to me, but even more importantly, it brings hope to children with cancers that currently have no curative options,” she further emphasised.
This program is supported by Cancer in Kids Auxiliary (CIKA).