Researcher profile

Profile: Associate Professor Natalie Taylor

When A/Prof Natalie Taylor was five, her parents promised they’d take her to the zoo if she could complete 1000 twirls of her hula hoop. What they hadn’t expected was that she could. One thousand spins later, Natalie and her family were off to the zoo.

This “can do” attitude has been a constant in A/Prof Taylor’s life which has seen her move to Australia from Preston, England, in pursuit of a career where she could make a difference. As an implementation scientist and university educator, she is certainly doing that.

Developing a Precision Medicine Clinic

In 2021, A/Prof Taylor and her collaborators including Professor David Thomas, Professor David Goldstein, A/Prof Kathy Tucker and Dr Frank Lin, were awarded a $5.8 million MRFF Rapid Applied Research Translation Grant over five years to integrate precision medicine into routine healthcare in Australia.

“Precision medicine aims to match the right patient to the right trial/ treatment/management pathway. Unfortunately, while the scientific advances are transformational, the health system and the clinical workforce are struggling to keep up, which means the benefits of precision medicine are not being realised for patients.

“We aim to solve this disconnect by establishing a Precision Medicine Clinic (P-OMICS-flow) in Prince of Wales Hospital for patients with rare cancers or families with inherited high cancer risk.

“The aim is to study and support the implementation of the clinic using evidence-based tools and approaches to ensure the care patients receive through precision medicine trials is coordinated with all relevant elements of the health system, rather than fragmented, as it has been in the past when research and clinical practice were quite separate.

“Care can be delivered remotely, and clinicians can refer patients, receive advice, and connect with experts in precision medicine to optimise treatment and management.”

A/Prof Taylor explains that the research will allow cancer patients with complex cancer-related problems, often with no standard treatment options, to best engage in the most relevant research, advance knowledge about cancer therapies, and continuously feed this new knowledge back into the health system.

Implementation science

“My job as an implementation scientist is to take an innovation that shows promise, or has been proven to work in a controlled trial, support its integration into the broader systems and clinical practices within an existing healthcare setting, and to study this process to understand how to scale things up.

“One of the critical ways of doing this is to build capacity, within the health industry, of people who understand how to initiate and sustain change among their own peers and within their own health settings.”

A/Prof Taylor is no stranger to capacity building. In 2012, she led the development of a training package for the implementation of clinical guidelines which has now been rolled out to more than 1,000 NHS staff in the UK. This training package and toolkit for implementation leads across seven key phases of implementation, with accompanying tools to support application. Since 2016 it has been adapted for the Australian health system and rolled out nationally as part of implementation research in hereditary cancer.

A/Prof Taylor has won two Cancer Institute NSW Premier’s Awardsone in 2016 for Translational Cancer Research and the other in 2022 for Outstanding Cancer ResearchCareer Development Fellow Award for her ongoing body of research to optimise the identification of people with bowel cancer who carry the Lynch Syndrome gene.

Approximately 65,000 people in Australia have the gene that causes Lynch Syndrome, a genetic condition that elevates the likelihood of developing certain types of cancer, particularly bowel cancer, throughout a person’s lifetime. The identification of bowel cancer patients who have Lynch Syndrome is crucial not only to provide life-saving treatment but also to implement preventative measures for those who may inherit the genes.

A/Prof Taylor’s research, ‘Hide and seek with hereditary cancer: Translating evidence into practice to identify colorectal cancer patients with a high risk of Lynch syndrome’ aimed at improving the use of clinical evidence by healthcare workers to more effectively identify which patients with bowel cancer should be tested for inherited Lynch Syndrome cancer genes.

“It was a tremendous privilege to receive the CINSW Premier’s Award amongst so many amazing scientists in the room. Implementation research is typically not as elaborate as basic and clinical science, but is crucial to ensuring scientific discoveries reach patients and understanding the best ways to make this happen. To have lifted the reputation of this field for making a significant contribution to improving care and outcomes for patients feels wonderful.”

Promoting Implementation Science

In Sydney, A/Prof Taylor is helping build capacity through her role as Chair of SPHERE’s Implementation Science Leaders’ Panel, a group under SPHERE’s Implementation Science Strategic Platform (co-led by Professor Sandy Middleton and A/Prof Caleb Ferguson). While only newly established, the aim is for the Panel to support researchers with other clinical or scientific specialities to create methodologically sound and appropriately resourced implementation science-related projects.

“In doing this, it will not only lift the capability of fellow researchers to incorporate implementation science methods into their own grant submissions, but will also lift the reputation of implementation scientists, their skillset, and the contribution they can make.”

As the Implementation Science course convener at the University of NSW’s School of Population Health, A/Prof Taylor is also helping to pave the way for new implementation scientists. She also supervises PhD students for projects with an

implementation science focus. Two such PhD student projects include Joseph Elias who is exploring how to scale up a childhood cancer survivorship program, and Elijah Tyedmers who is designing a study to test the impact of ProCure – a database developed by A/Professor Taylor’s team to support oncologists identify and gain compassionate access to drugs for hard-to-treat childhood cancer patients.

“Through my role I am sharing optimal implementation approaches with students, building more capacity for effective and efficient evidence translation in health.”

A/Prof Taylor’s own PhD could easily have come to a grinding halt when her PhD interview was interrupted by a police raid.

“I was travelling around Australia when my PhD interview was scheduled. So, there I was on the phone in a hostel lobby, talking about tailored interventions while trying to ignore the six policemen armed with batons and police dogs searching for a serial flasher!”

Despite the drama, the interview was a success and Natalie received her PhD in Health Psychology from The University of Leeds in 2011.

A/Prof Taylor laughs as she recalls the interview which became a lesson for tackling life.

“Despite the chaos that seems to follow me, I still manage to make things work.”

With more than 100 research papers, almost 6000 citations, five awards as well as 1000 hula hoop twirls under her belt, A/Prof Taylor’s notion of “making things work” is perhaps an understatement.