• Research to reduce dietary-related cancers wins 3MT final in Wagga Wagga

The promise of significant medical discoveries won over the judges at the Three Minute Thesis Final in Wagga Wagga last week with PhD research on reducing dietary-related cancers winning the competition.

Winning Charles Sturt University PhD candidate Ms Aduba Jok was born in Sudan and grew up in Melbourne, where she graduated from Swinburne University of Technology with a Bachelor of Biomedical Science and an Honours in Health Science.

She is currently a PhD candidate in Biomedical Science in the Charles Sturt School of Dentistry and Medical Sciences in Wagga Wagga.

During her time as an Honours student at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Ms Jok studied lung cancer chemotherapy and radiation. She was inspired after graduation to continue with research using alternative methods.

“The Functional Grain Centre developed projects using grains and this sparked my interest to develop this research and implement disease prevention strategies,” she said.

Ms Jok’s research is titled ‘The impact of sorghum phenolic compounds on cancer development pathways’ and focuses on processing sorghum using traditional methods, such as cooking and fermentation, experimentation using extraction of phenolic compounds and applications in cancer cell culture assays.

The aim of the research is to determine, if anti-cancer health benefits of eating sorghum in Australia were introduced, could it increase the production and consumption of sorghum? If so, this could lead to a decrease in dietary-related cancers, therefore bringing business to farmers and increasing a range of products for humans.

“Human clinical trials (in vivo) may be introduced in the future from this study, where healthy individuals could consume sorghum and their bodily fluids measured for health benefits,” she said.

“Hopefully, cancer patients could also be recruited for a similar study.”

Ms Jok won the Three Minute Thesis Final in Wagga Wagga last week with this research and will progress to the Asia-Pacific Finals in October.

The finals will be held online, and Ms Jok said she is looking forward to applying the feedback she received at the final in Wagga Wagga to the next round of the competition.

“Winning this competition reinforced how important this research is to the wider community,” she said.

“Everyone has either been affected by cancer themselves or knows someone who has. We need to intentionally increase prevention strategies for a better quality of life and a safe and affordable avenue for cancer treatment: diet.”