"Australia is leading the world in ovarian cancer research but ... we’re incredibly underfunded."

This year, Professor Stacey Edwards is proud to be part of OCRF’s Witchery White Shirt Campaign.

She is funded by OCRF to look for new ways to improve ovarian cancer treatments.

In particular, she wants to know how and why some breast and ovarian cancers become resistant to treatment.

To do that, Professor Edwards is looking at how tumours could reactive DNA repair pathways and long noncoding #RNAs, or lncRNAs, which are stretches of single-stranded genetic material that play a role in regulating the production of proteins.

The aim is to work out how the tumour is defending itself, and then how to take down those defences.

It’s a long way from the clinic, but this fundamental research is vital to understanding why so many women die from treatment-resistant ovarian cancer.