Dr Kathy Gately has been instrumental in key milestones and breakthroughs in cancer research during her career at St James’s Hospital. She has been working there since 2001, and in 2004 moved into the area of solid tumours, particularly relating to lung cancer. Her research now focuses on Precision Medicine, which tailors lung cancer treatments to individual patients. This requires “profiling patients’ tumours to build up a picture from the molecular side, so we can give the most appropriate drugs to the appropriate patients and get a more durable and sustained response to treatment.” She is also a PI in the Department of Clinical Medicine in Trinity College Dublin. Therapeutics, diagnostics and cancer awareness have all been improved thanks to her work as a Clinical Scientist.

After her PhD in Biochemistry at NUI Galway, in which she conducted research on genetic profiles, she decided to move into oncology. Her first postdoctoral position in 2001 was in St James’s, working with a team in the newly-emerging field of targeted therapy, in the area of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), an uncommon type of cancer of the bone marrow. This targeted therapy, using drugs known as Gleevec or Imatinib, turned out to be a game-changer for CML, and as a result targeted therapy has grown drastically as it now addresses many different types of cancer.

In 2004 Gately also established St James’s Lung Cancer Biobank along with her colleague, Clinical Scientist Dr Martin Barr. It was set up to collect samples from any patients coming to the hospital with a lung cancer diagnosis. “We try to capture both blood and tumour tissue from patients undergoing biopsy or surgery. We have to get consent from the patients and ensure they’re happy to be part of this biobank resource. And for patients going on chemotherapy or targeted therapy, such as immunotherapy, we track them over their treatment cycle.” These samples are stored so they can be used for ongoing research.

Gately points out that the biobank also enables invaluable collaborations between institutes in academia and the pharmaceutical industry. “Although we are the biggest cancer centre in Ireland, we're still small compared to big US. centres and elsewhere. It's important for us to be able to collaborate with bigger cancer groups in order to share knowledge and expertise, and to build up larger databases. Obviously, the more patients you have, the more diverse molecular profiles. That leads to better studies, so it's important for us to to be part of a bigger network.” Indeed, she observes, they are also part of the Irish network, the Irish Lung Cancer Alliance, and ETOP, the European Thoracic Oncology Platform. All these connections feed into St James’s research projects.

In 2014 she co-founded the Target Lung Cancer initiative at the SJH Foundation to raise public awareness of lung cancer. It was set up to fundraise for research equipment and patient care, but also “to engage with the public, the patients and families who are directly related and affected by the work we do at St James's. A lot of people don't know what the biobank does. We wanted to make it easier for patients to be able to consent when they come here. We remind people what lung cancer is, the symptoms and how it's treated, just to make public more aware of what to look out for.” Recently, the initiative held a Wicklow cycle challenge with over 200 cyclists to raise awareness through the media, such as East Coast FM who attended.

In 2013 she also edited and compiled Lung cancer: a comprehensive overview for Nova Publishers. This book is an in-depth survey into the landscape of cancer treatment and histopathology. Gately worked on it with pathologists from St James’s, who focused on different types of of lung cancer and treatments, chemotherapy and resistance, as well as diet and nutrition. She and one of her PhD students wrote a chapter on targeted therapy. The challenges involved in editing, she notes, include working with people from other institutions that you don't know, and reviewing numerous drafts of the same piece. All the while working to a deadline.

Of course, this led to the creation of a vital overview of the field of cancer in 2013. What, if anything, would change, were Gately to compile a second volume a decade on? “The good news is there has been a lot of change,” she confirms. “There are new therapies, the big one would be immunotherapy. Immunotherapies have been around in different forms for a quite a few years. But now there are checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T cells, and lots of new therapies that really have taken off in the last five to ten years.” There are lot of challenges to address in the same vein: “some patients do very well with these therapies, and others don't. We're only really learning what those differences are. That would be something that definitely would be an addition to an updated volume.”