Professor Melissa Southey delivers prestigious Jass Memorial Lecture

Professor Melissa Southey receives
 the 'Jass Memorial Lecture Microscope'
from Professor John Hopper

Monash University’s Chair of Precision Medicine, Professor Melissa Southey was invited to deliver the highly prestigious Jass Memorial Lecture at the Familial Aspects of Cancer: Research and Practice scientific meeting in Kingscliff, NSW earlier this month.

Professor Jeremy Jass was an outstanding and influential gastrointestinal researcher and pathologist who lost his battle against a malignant glioma of the brain ten years ago.

Professor Southey said it was a great honour being invited to give the lecture, in remembrance of their very special colleague.

In her lecture, Professor Southey paid tribute to the numerous professional attributes that made Professor Jass an outstanding researcher, an in particular, his persistence to challenge dogma in his thinking.

“Jeremy developed the principles of the Vogelstein model and defined colorectal cancer as a multipathway disease based on a correlation of clinical, morphological and molecular features,” Professor Southey said.

“Insightfully, Jeremy included DNA methylation as an important molecular feature of colorectal cancer and regarded it as a measure that should impact both (colorectal) cancer prevention and treatment.”

Professor Southey said that since his death, numerous initiatives have explored these ideas supported by high density molecular platforms combined with advanced analytical capacity. 

“Much has been learned – yet many studies remain linear in both design and thinking.”

“Consistent with Jeremy’s vision for DNA methylation⃰ to have a role in cancer prevention there is accumulating evidence of DNA methylation as a cancer risk factor – the most intriguing of these recent findings come from integrated studies that incorporate Jass histopathology annotations,” Professor Southey said.

Also at the scientific meeting, a large number of other presentations illustrated how Professor Southey’s team are contributing to advancing our understanding breast and prostate cancer, including the presentations from Dr Tu Nguyen-Dumont, Dr EE Ming Wong, Dr Rebecca Harris, Dr Elyse Dunn, Dr Mailie Gall, Dr Eric Joo, Dr Robert MacInnis, Dr Fleur Hammet, Dr Mahnaz Hosseinpour and Dr Medha Suman.

“The team were impressive!” Professor Southey said.

 ⃰ DNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism which involves chemical modification of DNA that does not change the DNA sequence.  In some specific circumstances, epigenetic variation can mimic genetic variation and predispose to disease.