Professor Richard Scolyer still cancer-free after world-first treatment

Joint Australian of the Year winner, Professor Richard Scolyer, has shared remarkable news in his fight against brain cancer.

The researcher revealed he's had no recurrence of the disease in ten months, after undergoing a high-risk, world-first treatment based on his own studies into melanoma.

He told Today while it is still early days, the average time of recurrence is six months, so he is "thrilled to have come this far".

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"When you've got a supposedly incurable cancer for which treatment hasn't changed in 19 years, well that didn't sit right with me," he said.

"So to be working with such an incredible team of people, particularly my colleague Professor Georgina Long, who co-directs the Melanoma Institute Australia with me, to try some of these therapies that we've developed and utilised in melanoma, which have made a massive difference to see if they might work in brain cancer, it seemed like an opportunity too good to knock back."

Scolyer and Long were both recognised at this year's Australia Day honours for their research into melanoma and the breakthrough treatment Scoyler himself put his hand up to be a guinea pig for after his diagnosis with a stage four glioblastoma.

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"I've been having what's called neoadjuvant combination immunotherapy, which was before the initial surgery to debulk the tumour," he said.

"We know in melanoma if you give the immunotherapy before you cut the tumour out, it's much more effective than cutting the tumour out and giving the immunotherapy - for example, 12 years ago, if you had stage four melanoma that had spread around your body pretty much most people were dead within a year.

"The five-year survival rate has gone from five to 55 per cent, so this had a massive impact in melanoma and many other cancers, but hadn't been tried in brain cancer - so we thought let's give it a crack and see if we can make a difference there."

See the full chat with Professor Scolyer in the video above