When Cara Griffin establishes her career as an Ear, Nose, and Throat surgeon (ENT) she will look back with gratitude to the PA Research Foundation for supporting her aspirations.
Cara was recently granted the first Women in Surgery and Research grant the Foundation has awarded. She will use the funds to publish research work in skull base osteomyelitis. Cara has also received a Foundation and Translation Research Institute Microgrant for head and neck cancer research work in which she has partnered with TRI based researcher Associate Professor Arutha Kulasinghe.
The doctor recently finished working in the role of Principal House Officer in ENT and is currently undertaking her ICU rotation, but has her eyes set on a lengthy career as an ENT surgeon.
“I've always have been more surgically inclined. I like to work with my hands. Surgery is satisfying in that you have a problem there and potentially you can fix it with one intervention, or at least improve things for the patient,” she said.
“I was introduced to ENT Surgery through an elective fourth-year rotation for medical students. I didn't really know a lot about it before going into that. But I undertook it here at PA Hospital, which is a large Head and Neck and Skull Base Surgery unit.
“I just really enjoyed working in the department. The team was very supportive, passionate about what they do, and keen to teach as well. That made me interested.
“I really enjoyed the rotation and decided I could be happy doing this. It's fulfilling work, especially the care provided for head and neck cancer patients.”
Cara’s current research project in skull base osteomyelitis is supervised by PAH Head and Neck Radiologist Dr Mitesh Gandhi and centers around retrospectively examining MRI scans for under-recognised findings.
“Skull base osteomyelitis is a difficult entity to recognise early and it does carry a high risk of morbidity and mortality,” Cara said.
“Risk factors include elderly patients, having diabetes and being immunocompromised. All these patients could have a mortality risk with this condition. Morbidity issues include cranial nerve palsies, for example, facial movements not working, swallowing issues, tongue movements not working properly.
“The earlier you can recognise the disease and then intervene with appropriate antibiotic therapy, the better the outcome will be for the patient.
“This project is to identify under-recognised imaging findings and highlight those. The target audience includes both the ENT and Radiology Departments as to picking up the disease process earlier.”
As the first recipient of a Women in Surgery Research Grant, Cara felt the Foundation was playing a vital role in keeping women interested in advancing their research ideas and surgery careers.
“It is particularly important for women to be represented more equally in surgery. I think coming out of medical school, there's an even proportion between women and men who say they're keen to do surgery, but that does drop off as the years progress after med school.
“For me, I just love surgery, so I'm keen to keep pursuing it. I appreciate the grant to help me with my research. I’m hopeful there'll be clinical benefit for the patients and it's a core tenet of a surgeon to progress research and academic work.
“This is the second grant I've received. The first one was a microgrant with PARF and TRI. That is a different project in relation to head and neck cancer.
“It's obviously immensely helpful to have funding to do this research. Because the technology to do the spatial profiling with Arutha’s lab is quite expensive, even with one tumour sample, they're running that through immunofluorescence analysis and multiplex algorithms. That's three to five million cells, so it’s quite expensive to even process one tumour tissue sample, so every little bit helps.”
