Suzanne Cory s Australia Prize-winning work was undertaken with her husband Professor Jerry Adams and their team of researchers at the Hall Institute. Cory and Adams work on cancer started 15 years ago, when they tracked down the genetic mutation which leads to Burkitt s lymphoma, a malignancy of antibody-producing cells called B lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are very unusual cells in that they deliberately break and then restitch a chromosome, says Cory. B lymphocytes do this in order to create functional antibody genes. But sometimes things go astray and the antibody gene on one chromosome gets hooked up to an oncogene on another chromosome.
Oncogenes are genes with potential to cause cancer.
In its new location, near the antibody gene, the oncogene loses the brakes that normally control its activity, and the floodgates to cancer are opened. Cory and Adams and their team extracted this altered gene from Burkitt s lymphoma cells and found it to be a myc gene, a gene previously suspected of causing leukemia in chickens. To prove that the Burkitt s myc gene had cancer-provoking potential, they injected it into mouse eggs. The mouse eggs which accepted the new gene all resulted in mice which developed lymphoma. Through this work, Cory and her team uncovered the root cause of Burkitt s lymphoma.