Gary Lee has dedicated his professional life to making it easier for people to breathe, and on Friday night he was recognised for his work at the annual Cancer Council WA awards.
Gary Lee has dedicated his professional life to making it easier for people to breathe, and on Friday night he was recognised for his work at the annual Cancer Council WA awards.
When medical researcher Gary Lee started working as a lung specialist in Western Australia a decade ago there was no dedicated pleural unit in the state.
Now, largely due to his work and that of his team at the University of Western Australia, all major hospitals in Perth have one, boosting patient care and delivering big savings.
Although not a strictly a cancer researcher, Professor Lee won Cancer Council WA’s Researcher of the Year award this month for his groundbreaking work promoting the use of an implantable device to drain the lungs of people with cancer to help them breathe, and teaching others how to use it.
“Cancer patients can build up cancer-related fluids inside the chest, often many litres, and as a result they can’t breathe,” Professor Lee told Business News.
“Many of these people have to keep coming into hospital.
“The constant lifting up of four or five kilograms for 12 breaths per minute, 24 hours per day is what makes them feel bad.”
Professor Lee said data from WA seven or eight years ago suggested people with cancer-related fluids occupied 8,000 hospital bed days in the public sector at an inpatient care cost of $10 million.
“The conventional way is to drain it and put some talcum powder in there,” he said.
“That’s been done since 1935 and it’s not been changed at all.”
To improve patient outcomes, Professor Lee and his team began testing an implantable device with a tube that sits in the chest connected to a plastic one-way valve outside the body. This allows the patient to remain at home and simply connect the tube to a suction bottle to be drained when fluid accumulates.
“I guess the conventional people wouldn’t believe that you should put an implanted device in people’s chest, but we showed that it was useful in terms of reducing procedures, reducing the number of days in hospital and provides significant improvement in symptoms and quality of life in all our studies,” Professor Lee said.
“People treated with the conventional talc method spend about 11 per cent or one in nine of their remaining days in hospital, this has reduced to 6 per cent, which is about one in 16 days.
“From a patient point of view, obviously it allows them to spend more of their days of their remaining life outside hospital.
“From a healthcare perspective, it means it will save a number of days in hospital.
“If we calculate it across Australia, if everyone used this instead of the talc method, it will save 14,000 hospital bed days each year.
“That’s the advantage of doing that.”
While those with many types of cancer can accumulate fluid on their lungs, it was more common in people with breast cancer, lung cancer or mesothelioma.
Professor Lee said he was drawn to becoming a lung specialist because of the practical patient benefits such work could bring about.
“Other than giving oxygen to people or giving inhalers to people who are asthmatic, this is probably one of the fastest and most efficient ways of relieving people’s breathlessness,” he said.
“It’s quite satisfying as a doctor.”
Professor Lee and his team have run workshops to train about 20 younger specialists in this area so each of the tertiary hospitals in Perth has now got a pleural service, the only state in the country to do so.
Cancer Council WA chief executive Ashley Reid said Professor Lee’s work was world class.
“In Professor Lee’s case, he had been a recipient of a number of grants and done some world-leading research and … also spent time supporting younger researchers, supporting post-doctoral fellows on that basis, the committee thought he was a fine recipient for researcher of the year,” Mr Reid said.
Professor Lee insisted the award was not for him but for his team and said he was excited their research area could attract excellent early-career researchers from all over the world for fellowships.
“That is the other really gratifying thing is seeing younger people develop, growing to become their own independent investigators,” he said.
