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Dr Ben Harper is determined to improve cancer patients鈥 lives by investigating new treatments with fewer side effects. He is keen to specialise in oncology (research, diagnosis and treatment of cancer) after he鈥檚 trained as a physician at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle.
鈥淭here are always research opportunities, even if I鈥檓 not in the laboratory,鈥 he says. 鈥淚鈥檓 working with patients and doing clinical research, which is really interesting.鈥
Dr Harper loved chemistry and physics in high school, though didn鈥檛 get the marks to study medicine straight away. Instead, he chose Medical Science at Western as a base to build on, and has not looked back. 鈥淭he best advice shared with me is that if you don鈥檛 know where you want your career to go, build on your marks to open up your options,鈥 he explains.
鈥淲estern is rated highly and I believe offers a much better lifestyle compared to city campuses too.鈥
Professor Janice Aldrich-Wright at the Campbelltown campus, whose research into anticancer agents has gained international recognition, encouraged him to make something of his passion for chemistry. And she told him to knuckle down for Honours in Medical Science. 鈥淚 guess she saw something in me as a researcher I hadn鈥檛 seen in myself yet,鈥 he says.
鈥淪he motivated me to embrace research culture; it鈥檚 exciting science that could make a big contribution to improving society, one medication at a time.鈥
Dr Harper also gained his PhD under Professor Aldrich-Wright鈥檚 supervision, testing platinumbased anti-cancer drugs that can bind to DNA. One molecule he made added a fluorescent tag to an anti-cancer drug so he could study its movement into cells and he found it was quite effective at killing cancer cells.
Support from Western allowed him to present those findings in Sweden, including to biochemist Professor Roger Yonchien Tsien who won a Nobel Prize for his development of green fluorescent protein. The University鈥檚 network also opened doors for a career in medicine.
鈥淎fter my PhD I was offered a research job in Israel through collaborative work of my professor, working on platinum-based anticancer drug design. I was able to bring the research I had worked on at Western to an international platform and it also enabled me to get into the medical degree鈥 he says.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of interest in many of these 鈥榖iological drugs鈥 which don鈥檛 have quite the toxic profile of the classical chemotherapy drugs. If we can make drugs with fewer side effects and improve the survival of patients, that will be a great achievement.鈥
WORDS BY STUART RIDLEY
