Background
Dr Amy Prawira is a medical oncologist specialising in early drug development and head and neck malignancies.
She joined the Kinghorn Cancer Centre to lead the Precision Medicine (Phase I) Unit after completing a clinical fellowship under Prof Lillian Siu at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Canada, where she served as a chief fellow for the drug development program. For her contribution to the patients and oncology community within the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, she was awarded the 2017 Best Fellow Award.
Her fellowship focused on early phase clinical trials and in the development of translational studies for patients with head and neck malignancies.
She has been an investigator in over 90 early phase clinical trials, and has been involved in the design and set up of a number of investigator-initiated clinical trials. She has received the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2016 Merit Award and the European Society of Medical Oncology 2016 Travel Grant. In 2016, she completed the ECCO-AACR-EORTC-ESMO workshop on methods in clinical cancer research.
The Precision (Phase I) Medicine Unit that she built is unique in Australia, as all members of the team, including clinical trials coordinators and data entry managers, are internally trained to specialise in the high-quality conduct of early phase and first-in-human clinical trials.
The Kinghorn Cancer Centre Precision Medicine (Phase I ) Unit is currently the preferred site for a number of large pharmaceutical companies, and has been trusted to enrol first-patient first-visit for a number of novel molecules in global first-in-human studies. Since 2019, it is also the largest early phase clinical trials unit in NSW.
Dr Prawira has been closely involved in developing and refining the clinical trial protocols for a number of academic collaborators and partnering pharmaceutical companies. She currently serves as a faculty member for the Asia Pacific Clinical Oncology Research Development (ACORD) workshop.
Presentation Summary
The future of immunotherapy:
- What is a clinical trial?
- What are the novel treatment approaches on the horizon?
- How can I access a clinical trial and what does it involve?