Clinical Work
Bench to Bedside
Amongst the most notable achievements of the 20th century was the eradication of infectious diseases such as polio and smallpox through vaccination. Today scientists at the Malaghan Institute are leading the charge in the search for more effective ways to exploit the potency and specificity of the immune system by using vaccination to treat diseases such as cancer.
It is clear that different vaccination strategies or immunotherapies will benefit different people, in much the same way that some individual's immune systems seem to work better than others. The only way of knowing how a newly developed immunotherapy will work in individual patients, after having shown promising results in experimental models, is to carry out a clinical trial.
Over the past decade the Malaghan Institute has become increasingly focused on translating our basic biomedical research into real results for patients - a "bench to bedside" philosophy that has led to our involvement in three clinical trials with clinicians from Wellington Hospital and the Wellington Blood and Cancer Centre.
