Honouring Michelle’s legacy through lifesaving breast cancer research

In memory of their beloved daughter and sister Michelle, who passed away from breast cancer in 2023, Joan and her family established the Michelle’s Dragonfly Award through the Joan of Hearts Foundation.

This meaningful act of philanthropy is empowering PhD student Lara Abbouche to explore new ways to prevent and treat breast cancer by investigating FANCM – a critical DNA repair protein linked to breast cancer.

FANCM acts like a tiny motor that detects and fixes damaged or tangled DNA to keep cells healthy. When this process fails, errors in the genetic code can lead to serious diseases like breast cancer can develop.

Thanks to this philanthropic support, Lara has made several significant discoveries. She identified how FANCM binds to damaged DNA, a key early step in the repair process, and found that blocking this step could selectively kill certain cancer cells. These findings were published in Nucleic Acids Research and earned Lara the 2024 SVI’s Director’s Award for Most Outstanding Student Publication.

Building on this momentum, Lara also developed a new lab test to measure FANCM’s motor activity. Using this tool, she pinpointed two crucial regions of the protein responsible for activating its repair function. This research was published in the prestigious European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) Journal. In collaboration with an industry partner, Lara showed that a chemical compound could block FANCM’s activity, opening the door to potential new cancer therapies.

Michelle’s Dragonfly Award has not only supported Lara’s research but also enabled her to present her work internationally, from Melbourne to Oxford, the island of Crete and the Francis Crick Institute in London.

“This support has enabled me to focus my efforts on furthering my research and has empowered me to make a number of significant contributions to the field that would otherwise not be possible,” said Lara.

Following the completion of her PhD, Lara hopes to keep exploring the therapeutic potential of targeting FANCM as well as other DNA repair proteins that may be relevant to inherited diseases.

“With further research, we could achieve earlier detection of breast cancer, as well as targeted treatment against other cancers,” said Lara.

Through their generosity, Joan and her family are honouring Michelle’s memory and helping to advance cancer research with the potential to benefit people across Australia and beyond.