Intestinal fortitude.

Starting at the mouth and working down to the tail, Erin Symonds has spent her 24-year research career focused on the science of the gastrointestinal system.

It’s important and urgent work. Despite a national screening program for bowel cancer, 5,000 Australians die from the disease every year. At the Flinders Centre for Innovation in Cancer (FCIC), Associate Professor Symonds is finding new ways to identify and track bowel cancers so they can be picked up earlier and treated more effectively.

“Initially, I started working on breath tests to assess digestion, and then moved on to probiotics and food poisoning, nutrition and obesity, and the small intestine” she says. “Now I’m focussed mainly on bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer, a disease of the large intestine.”

Of the 5,000 or more Australians who lose their life to bowel cancer, most are aged over 50, but increasing proportions are in their 20s, 30s and 40s.

Through a program of collaborative and clinically linked research at Flinders, Associate Professor Symonds and her team are developing new methods for detecting and managing bowel cancer.

“The work we do at the FCIC aims to improve clinical care pathways for bowel cancer patients,” she says. “This includes primary prevention for people we know are at elevated risk of bowel cancer, and working with bowel cancer survivors to track their treatment and monitor cancer recurrence more accurately.”

People are considered at higher risk of bowel cancer if they have a close family member who has been diagnosed, or if screening tests identify growths in their intestine known as adenomas, or pre-cancerous polyps.

Associate Professor Symonds and her research team were awarded a Medical Research Future Fund grant to identify bowel cancer biomarkers, molecules which accurately indicate the presence and size of a cancer.  

“Currently the common way to monitor bowel cancers is with scans, which only provide visual information and involve the patient being exposed to radiation,” she says. “We’d like to offer a safer and cheaper test; a biomarker that can detect the cancer directly.”

The candidate biomarkers are fragments of cancer DNA that are found in a patient’s blood.

“We’ve published a number of papers on this now, and the blood biomarker approach looks very promising as a tool for bowel cancer surveillance during and after treatment,” Associate Professor Symonds says.