Research News

Dr. Sirinya Sitthirak, a cholangiocarcinoma researcher at Walailak University, received two awards at Walailak Research Day 2026 (WRD 2026) on Tuesday, recognizing work aimed at catching one of Thailand's deadliest cancers earlier and making targeted treatment for it more affordable.

Held at the Pattarathammaporn Chamber in the Walailak University Hospital building, WRD 2026 brought together researchers, funding agencies, and university leadership to showcase ongoing projects and honor top-performing faculty at the university's annual research excellence honors ceremony. Dr. Sirinya received an award at the "Very Good" level in the Health Sciences category for emerging researchers, along with the second honor “The Publication Award” recognizing her as the emerging researcher in Health Sciences with the highest number of articles published in Scopus-indexed journals in 2026.

A lecturer in the Department of Medical Science, School of Medicine, Dr. Sirinya shares that her work centers on cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile ducts for which Northeast Thailand has long recorded one of the world's highest incidence rates, driven largely by chronic infection with the liver fluke Opisthorchis viverrini. Most patients, she said, are not diagnosed until the disease has reached stage three or four, when treatment options narrow sharply and many are moved into palliative care.

"The problem with this cancer is that we usually find it at stage three or four, when it's difficult to treat," Dr. Sirinya said. Her research approaches the problem on two fronts: finding cholangiocarcinoma earlier, and designing treatments precise and affordable enough to reach ordinary patients.

One strand of Dr. Sirinya's work looks at how proteins inside tumor cells get chemically switched "on" or "off" — a process called phosphorylation. When certain proteins are phosphorylated, they can activate signaling pathways that make cancer grow faster and become more aggressive. Finding which of these switches are reliably flipped across different patients' tumors is a first step toward designing a drug to target them.

In a study published in the MDPI journal Medical Sciences in January 2026, Dr. Sirinya and an international team of collaborators analyzed tumor and surrounding tissue from 13 cholangiocarcinoma patients in Northeast Thailand, sampling four distinct regions of each tumor — 52 samples in total. Despite considerable variation between patients, the team identified two phosphoprotein networks shared across all of the tumors studied: one centered on a hyperphosphorylated form of the protein β-catenin, which helps cells stick together and drives a growth pathway called Wnt signaling; and another built around two metal-binding proteins, MT1G and MT2A, which normally help cells manage zinc and copper and defend against cellular stress. Both networks were linked to chemotherapy drugs already used to treat the disease, including cisplatin, gemcitabine, and 5-fluorouracil — with cisplatin acting as a kind of hub connecting the two.

The researchers were careful to note that these findings are still exploratory: when they checked whether the same proteins were associated with how long patients survived after surgery, the trend pointed in the expected direction — patients with more active versions of these proteins tended to fare worse — but it did not reach statistical significance in this relatively small group of patients. Larger, follow-up studies will be needed to confirm whether the markers can reliably predict outcomes or treatment response.

"If we can find a phosphoprotein that shows up across patients, we can design a drug to target it and slow the disease down," Dr. Sirinya said. She noted that targeted therapy remains out of reach for most Thais, currently accessible mainly to patients with civil servant health benefits. Her team's approach, she said, is to design treatments that work alongside standard chemotherapy so patients covered under Thailand's Universal Coverage Scheme — commonly known as the "30-baht scheme" — can eventually access them too. "We think the cost of targeted therapy will come down over time, and eventually everyone will be able to access it," she added, pointing to parallel efforts to develop treatments using materials that do not all need to be imported.

The second strand of her research looks for ways to catch cholangiocarcinoma before it becomes advanced. One team is searching for early-detection biomarkers capable of flagging pre-cancerous changes; a second, made up of surgeons and radiologists, uses ultrasound to screen the bile ducts for periductal fibrosis, a known warning sign, following up with patients found to have it to monitor for signs of progression.

This work feeds into a broader push toward personalized medicine — treatment tailored to the individual patient — which Dr. Sirinya said could meaningfully extend how long patients live. "We want to improve quality of life and extend survival — from around a year to five, six, even ten years," she said. Her group is also in the drug-discovery stage of developing new therapies designed to carry fewer side effects than chemotherapy and cost less to produce.

The published study reflects a wide network of institutional partners: Khon Kaen University; Mahasarakham University; the National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC) in Thailand; the University of Edinburgh's MRC Human Genetics Unit in the United Kingdom; the National Cancer Centre Singapore and Duke-NUS Medical School; and Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Sirinya said her broader research program also draws on collaboration with Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the National University of Singapore, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a World Health Organization agency.

WRD 2026 also featured an Emerging Researchers Zone and a Research Excellence Showcase spotlighting work from the university's centers of excellence, part of a broader push by Walailak University to expand its international research output and translate findings into real-world impact.