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Two young women are working at the forefront of a health disaster that started in the blue asbestos mining industry in the Pilbara last century.

Jenettte Creaney spends her days in the lab or at her computer in the National Centre for Asbestos Related Diseases.

Her colleague Anna Nowak divides her time between her research and her patients, most of them suffering from the deadly lung cancer mesothelioma.

Together, they are part of a close-knit team that works to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of mesothelioma, a disease that is peculiarly linked to Western Australia through mines at Wittenoom.

Professor Creaney is a research scientist, leader of the biomarkers and discovery team and manager of an extensive tissue bank. She is part of the group dedicated to diagnosis of mesothelioma and identification of the treatments best suited to individual patients.

Professor Nowak is a medical oncologist, who spends up to 50 per cent of her time with her patients, 60 to 70 of them at any one time with mesothelioma. She is also involved in clinical trials of treatments for mesothelioma which she first explored during her PhD 10 years ago, under Winthrop Professor Bruce Robinson, Director of the Centre.

The Centre, and its staff of medical researchers, comes under the wing of the University's School of Medicine and Pharmacology at QEII.

It is more than 40 years since the Wittenoom mine, Australia's only supplier of blue asbestos, was shut down. Each year there are about 100 cases of mesothelioma in WA.

That means there are twice as many people in WA who contract the cancer as there are winners of the major Saturday night Lotto prize.

The major prize that researchers like Professor Nowak, Professor Creaney, Professor Robinson and others, including Clinical Professor Bill Musk, Professor Richard Lake and Professor Nick de Klerk (at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research), seek is a treatment for mesothelioma, to be able to restore its victims to health.

"At the moment, the most positive thing that patients can do is reframe their expectation of a long life to that of a quality life," Professor Nowak said. "And this can be a very affirming thing, it can bring families together. It's the reason I don't find my work distressing but rather uplifting."

QEII is the only site in WA where clinical trials are being run for treatments of mesothelioma.

One is a combined immunotherapy/chemotherapy regime. "The immunotherapy, which is administered intravenously every three weeks, accelerates the immune system's response to the cancer," Professor Nowak explained. "The patients in the trial are enormously generous with their time, turning up every week for blood tests, some of them driving for two or three hours to be here at 9am."

She said the Phase1 trial had found a safe and tolerable dose for the drug therapy and that some of her early patients had had no further chemotherapy for a year, with no progression in their cancer.

"That's unusual and exciting but certainly far too early for bells and whistles," she said.

The other trial also combines immunotherapy and chemotherapy, but instead of boosting the positive cells, it is trying to get ride of ‘brakes' on the immune system, the negative regulatory, or Treg cells that inhibit immune response.

Meanwhile, Professor Creaney and her team are looking for new biomarkers for the disease.

"A biomarker is a factor, whether it's a sugar or a protein or a gene, that is overexpressed by the cancer cells and reflects their presence or make-up," she explained. She won the Young Investigator of the Year from the International Mesothelioma Interest Group in 2008 for her work on the biomarker mesothelin.

"But we have started looking for new biomarkers that will help us to define which treatment will best suit a patient, after diagnosis. We have a lot of preliminary data from studying the samples in our tissue bank and we're hoping for more funding to continue our research."

In bringing their research from the bench top to the bedside, both Professor Creaney and Professor Nowak acknowledge their talented, dedicated and supportive colleagues.

"I work with an amazing team of scientists who are happy to have a clinician (albeit a scientist as well) amongst them," Professor Nowak said.

Published in UWA News , 22 August 2011