 Research can be important but it can also be personal and profound and our next finalist certainly knows this firsthand. I'd like to introduce Erin Andrew to the stage. Erin's from the College of Science and the title of her three-minute thesis tonight is Cancer Immunotherapy Fighting Back Against Cancer. Cancer sucks and if you're like me and have experienced chemotherapy it sucks too. It sucks because it creates the most horrible and debilitating side effects. Many chemotherapy patients describe their treatment as poisoning the body and just praying that it kills the cancer first. Not only is it an extremely toxic way of treating cancer but it's also incredibly expensive. With all had stories of people who have had to remortgage their homes or who have ended up in crippling debt just to pay for a treatment that may increase their chance of survival. So there is no doubt that we're in need of better cheaper cancer treatments. About 10 years ago we discovered that we can use our immune system to fight cancer. We have immune cells that can eat cancer cells that can force cancer cells to die and they can go around waking up the rest of the immune system saying look there's a cancer there we need to kill it. We get cancer because our immune system isn't working properly. This is because cancer is able to manipulate its environment to put immune cells to sleep so they can't recognize the cancer anymore. This is where immunotherapy comes in. Immunotherapy is a way of waking up the immune system so it can fight back against cancer and one really effective way of waking up the immune system is through bacteria. So we hypothesized what if we were to inject dead bacteria in a thick sticky substance straight into a solar tumor. Because of the consistency of this treatment it'll keep it at the tumor site so it's not easily removed by the body and the dead bacteria will bring in immune cells from all over to the tumor when once they're there they're activated by the bacteria and they're woken up and they can mount an attack against the cancer. I've tested this hypothesis in the lab using mouse models of cancer and I look at which immune cells are having the effect on the tumor removal because if I can work out which cells are doing the job and how they're doing it I can make it so our treatment works in every single patient. For the last two years we've been treating naturally occurring tumors in dogs and horses in Australia but this year we were granted a clinical trial at the Canberra Hospital treating cancer patients with any type of solar tumor with just one injection of our immunotherapy. But remember how I said that cancer treatments are usually incredibly expensive? Well we're treating our cancer patients for just five dollars a dose. So not only are we removing the financial burden that comes with a cancer diagnosis and removing the horrible side effects that come with standard cancer treatments by using our body's natural immune defenses but we're going to change the whole story. We're going to make cancer suck just a little bit less.