British Punjabi doctor leads ground-breaking international trial of bowel cancer vaccine

LONDON: A British Indian doctor whose grandfather moved to the UK from a Punjab village to work in a “Brylcreem” factory is now leading the first international trial of a landmark vaccine to fight bowel cancer.Dr Tony Dhillon (53), a consultant medical oncologist at Royal Surrey NHS Hospital Trust and senior lecturer in oncology, was born in Maidenhead.His paternal grandfather arrived in UK in the early 1950s from Surja village, Jalandhar district.He has spent the last five years working on the vaccine with Professor Tim Price in Australia. “This vaccine is not for all patients with bowel cancer, rather 15% of the total population of patients. There is a sub-type of cancer that this vaccine will only work on,” he explained.Three doses of the vaccine will be given two weeks apart before surgery to activate the immune system to kill the cancer. “We reckon when patients go to operation there won’t be much cancer left, and with some people it might go completely. We need to do the trials to prove that, and that is what we are about to start,” he said.The vaccine has been designed by Imugene, a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company in Australia. Forty-four patients will take part in the phase 2 trial, which is expected to last one year, at 10 centres across the UK and Australia.“This vaccine could work in other cancers and we may do trials with other cancer types later on,” he added.Dr Dhillon’s grandfather lived in Southall first and then moved to Maidenhead to work in the Brylcreem factory. Dhillon’s father did not come until the early ’60s and his mother came to marry his father in 1967 from Bilga, Jalandhar district. Both his parents worked in factories. “My parents were not formally educated and probably don’t even know what I do for a job,” said Dhillon, who went to UCL for medical school, did a PhD at Imperial College London and post-graduate work at Oxford. He is now chief investigator in this trial, which could be a major breakthrough in bowel cancer treatment.“I feel very proud to do international level research which could impact hundreds of thousands of people. It shows how much of a meritocracy the UK is — for someone who is a second-generation Punjabi from a working-class family to reach this level is fantastic,” he told TOI.