The Victorian Epigenetics Group (VEG) was established in 2009 with a $2.3 million grant from the Victorian Cancer Agency (VCA) and most recently has been the recipient of a new VCA Translational Research Projects grant of $1 million annually for 2014-2017.
Internationally recognised VEG collaborators undertake translational research in epigenetics, focusing on the laboratory-clinic interface to provide personalised epigenetic therapy for patients with haematological malignancies through pre-clinical evaluation, identifying biomarkers for response and relapse and testing these in the clinic using early phase clinical trials of epigenetic therapies and combinations.
The three key platforms; clinical trials, biomarker and discovery are facilitated by a VEG specimen database capturing details of all samples from VEG trials.
VEG, led by Professor Miles Prince, specialises in providing a platform to enable cross collaboration between fundamental researchers and haematological clinicians leading to clinical trials in the application of histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) and DNA demethylating agents (DMA) in haematological cancers.