Funding boost for cutting-edge breast cancer research in Canterbury

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Cutting-edge breast cancer research in Canterbury has received a funding boost.

It is one of five new research grants Canterbury and West Coast DHBs have snagged from the Health Research Council.

The largest grant for the DHBs went to Canterbury Health Laboratories anatomical pathologist Dr Gavin Harris, who said the potential is huge.

His research is focused on developing the cutting-edge practice of computational pathology.

This involves generating computer algorithms that can be used to analyse digitised glass slides for much quicker, accurate, objective analysis.

Harris said the method would significantly speed up the time it takes clinicians to review a cancerous breast tissue sample and see how it would respond to different treatments.

"At the moment it takes one to two hours to manually review a single breast tissue sample and produce a report for clinicians to view.

"With computational pathology we would expect that that would reduce the time significantly. This would have big implications for how we meet increasing cancer rates with scarce specialist resources."

This latest grant is the third Harris has received for this work since 2019 and will provide the funding for him to partly step back from his day job and devote more time to his research.

The West Coast DHB has also received funding for a number of research projects,