Brendon Coventry

Brendon Coventry MBBS PhD FRACS is a surgical oncologist, immunologist, and medical researcher in Adelaide, South Australia.
Coventry's research contributions have been made in the field of immunology.
Research
Beginning in the late 1990s, Coventry noticed that some of his patients responded better to the melanoma vaccine better than other patients despite receiving identical treatment. When local cancer tumours where injected with the vaccine, cancers that had not been injected began to shrink as well, thus indicating an immunogenic relationship. These observations led him to speculate that the immune system operates in a cyclical manner, with peaks and troughs. Operating on this theory, Coventry was able to increase complete response rates to treatment of advanced melanoma from 7% to 17% and without significant negative side effects.
According to Coventry, "he immune system works in waves that seems to be switching on and off constantly. And now what we're trying to do is see whether we can identify periods or phases in that cycle where we could target the vaccine more effectively..."
Speaking to the Scientific American in 2014, Coventry stated that "normous amounts of money and the brightest minds in biological and medical science have failed to make a big impact in the war on cancer, so maybe it’s time for a new paradigm". He has also been critical of the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies over the Australian health care system, particularly because public tax revenues are used to pay for the inflated costs of treatment and the failure to improve survival rates. This has meant that billions of dollars have been spent, much of it on newer drugs, but without a corresponding improvement in treatment outcomes for patients with advanced cancer.
The effectiveness of treatment for patients with advanced cancer has not had a notable improvement since the middle of the 20th century. Despite the discovery of the human immune cycle, the discovery of the ability to manipulate the cycle, and the ramifications of these discoveries for many immunologically related diseases, funding for the clinical trials has not been forthcoming from public grants schemes including the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).<ref name="theaustralian.com.au"/>

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