Melanoma treatment pioneers joint Australians of the Year

Pioneers in melanoma treatment, professors Georgina Long and Richard Scolyer, are the joint 2024 Australians of the Year.

The Sydney-based professors are the co-directors of Melanoma Institute Australia, and their partnership is credited with saving thousands of lives.

Their work on immunotherapy, which activates the patient’s own immune system to fight the cancer, advanced melanoma from a fatal disease to one that is curable.

Around 18,000 Australians are diagnosed with melanoma each year, with the cancer killing 1,300 people a year. However the chance of death from melanoma has declined rapidly over the past decade.

Scolyer, 57, was diagnosed last year with incurable, stage four brain cancer. He made himself a guinea pig for high-risk treatment for brain cancer and, using the team’s melanoma breakthroughs, became the world’s first brain cancer patient to have combination immunotherapy before surgery.

Scolyer has now exceeded the median time for recurrence. “Still no recurrence of my supposedly incurable #glioblastoma!,” he wrote this week on his Facebook page, My Uncertain Path, where he publicly documents his cancer journey. “Median time to recurrence for all patients is 6 months; I’m now out to 8 months!”

Sculler told ABC’s Australian Story program, “Brain cancer doctors were so worried this would kill me quicker or result in terrible side effects. But so far so good.”

He said for him the medical decision was “not a hard decision to make when you’re faced with certain death. I’m more than happy to be the guinea pig to do this.”