FORMER Wangaratta High School graduate and now stem cell researcher Dr Dustin Flanagan has been recognised as one of Australia’s rising stars in his field as a winner of the 2023 Metcalf Prize.

One of two winners of the highly sought after award in the stem cell research field, the $60,000 main prize pinpoints two mid-career rising stars which aims to recognise and reward scientists who are conducting excellent and sustained work focused on stem cell research.

The National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia awarded Dr Flanagan the prize in recognition of his leadership in the field in his current and past research which has led to the development of treatments for Crohn’s disease, bowel cancer, and other gastrointestinal conditions.

Dr Flanagan said it was a humbling honour to be named among the highly regarded alumni of the Metcalf Prize.

“It’s good company to keep; you don’t always think of yourself in that sort of realm and to get a bit of a tap on the shoulder it’s nice,” he said.

“I’ve always tended to think I was in the background, I put my hand up for it and the judges voted in my favour so it does feel good but it was unexpected.”

During his postdoctoral work in Scotland, Dr Flanagan made breakthroughs in colorectal cancer research as he and his team discovered a way to identify 'born to be bad' tumours in the early stages of colorectal cancer, which have only ever been identified in late–stage cancers.

He’s now at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute turning his attention to stomach cancer, which is less common than bowel cancer but just as lethal.

Currently, people diagnosed with late-stage stomach cancer have a less than 10 per cent chance of surviving more than five years - around 1200 Australians die from stomach cancer each year.

Dr Flanagan said he and his team were investigating the ‘plasticity’ of cancer stem cells to find weaknesses that can be targeted with new drugs.

“A lot of the time the standard treatment plan, which is maybe chemotherapy and another type of drug, tends to have a decent initial effect at knocking the head of the tumour, but then those patients will sadly become resistant to those treatments and then they’re left with not much option at all,” he said.

“Little is known about the molecular blueprints that control stomach cancer stem cells in particular.”

Dr Flanagan said with the help of the winnings of the Metcalf Prize, his goal was to make discoveries that have the potential to generate new therapies for therapy resistant metastatic gastric cancer.

“But I hope my research will also produce powerful insights that can be shared with the broader cancer research community and applied to other cancers plagued by drug resistance, such as breast and lung cancer,” he said.

The 2023 Metcalf Prizes for Stem Cell Research will be formally presented at the Australasian Society of Stem Cell Research Annual Scientific Meeting in Sydney on Wednesday, November 15.