Professor Stacey Edwards remembers in the 1980s, when her mum was diagnosed with breast cancer, nobody talked about the disease.
Stacey was five when her mum, Kay Wardrop, discovered a lump in her breast and needed a mastectomy and debilitating radiotherapy.
“Mum spent a lot of time in hospital, and she had to have some terrible treatments,” Stacey, now 52, from Brisbane, tells New Idea.
“I remember thinking ‘why does my mum have this? No-one else’s mum seems to be going through this.’
“I knew she had breast cancer, but I didn’t understand what cancer actually was. I only knew it was something bad.”
For 18 years, Stacey’s mother fought the disease. During that time, the cancer appeared in her other breast.
When Stacey was 21 and had just finished a degree in molecular biology, oncologists discovered the cancer had spread to Kay’s bones. Six months later, in 1996, she passed away at the age of 52.
“I’d been planning a gap year overseas after university, and Mum didn’t tell me about the bone cancer because she knew I wouldn’t leave and she wanted me to go and live my dream,” Stacey says.
“I’d been in London two months when Dad called and said ‘you’ve got to come home.’ I flew back to Brisbane and had five days with my beautiful mum before she passed.”
But Kay died knowing her daughter was on a mission to improve the future for other women diagnosed with breast cancer.
“By the time I was in high school I knew I wanted to do breast cancer research so I could understand why my mum got this disease and how I could help,” Stacey says.
“Mum knew my plan and she was very proud.”
Stacey has since spent years researching breast cancer and is currently a scientist at QIMR Berghofer in Brisbane.
She is part of a team, with Professor Juliet French, that has just had a world-first breakthrough.
They have discovered a cancer-fighting RNA molecule that could hold the key to a new way of treating the most common form of breast cancer – hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. It’s the one that accounts for about 70 per cent of breast cancer diagnoses.
“We hit so many roadblocks trying to understand how the RNA molecule worked and then we had that exciting moment when we figured it out,” Stacey says.
“We introduced the RNA molecule into several breast cancer cell samples and left them overnight. When we returned to the lab the next morning, all the cancer cells were dead.
“We could hardly believe what we were seeing. There was a lot of jumping around and yelling! We knew we had something that could one day change breast cancer treatment.”
The discovery is the result of seven years of painstaking research. The next step is to transform Stacey’s findings into a treatment.
Before that can happen more research and funding are needed and, while clinical trials may be three or four years away, Stacey is determined it will happen.
“If mum had got breast cancer five to 10 years later, she’d probably still be alive because screening programs and treatments have come on in leaps and bounds,” Stacey says.
Now her research could help the next generation of women with breast cancer so another daughter, like Stacey, might be able to keep their mum.
