A new facility to open in Western Australia will be working at the forefront of cancer research, using single-cell sequencing technology to create personalised cancer-treatment.

The facility will be run by Professor Alistair Forrest from the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research after it was granted $6.75 million by the Cancer Research Trust.

Professor Forrest said the single-cell sequencing technology was revolutionising cancer research and treatment.

"Traditionally a pathologist would take a piece of tumour and they'd try to classify it as a type of breast cancer or a type of prostate cancer and based on that they'd recommend a set of drugs," he said.

"The problem is the tumours evolve - as they grow the tumour cells are accumulating new mutations each time, so they're not uniform.

"Some of the cells are likely to be able to be killed by the drug but some of the cells will survive and those are the cells that go on to form a recurrent tumour later on."

No two tumours the same

Professor Forrest said in the past, most of the research was conducted by comparing one "whole" tumour to another; like one bowl of fruit salad to another bowl of fruit salad which was ultimately flawed because no two could be exactly the same.

"What the single cell technology allows us to do is actually look at how many of each of the different cell types, or how many different types of fruit, are present in mixture one versus mixture two," he said.

The technique will lead to personalised drugs that target specific cancer cells.

"In the future I would envisage you'd take a tumour and you'd be doing single cell profiling to determine what sets of drugs you should be using on that particular patient's tumour.

"You wouldn't only be looking at one gene, or a handful of protein markers on a microscope slide, you'd be getting the information for thousands of cells and tens of thousands of genes."

Specialists to create 'cancer atlas'

The funding will bring together 42 members across Perth to improve treatment for all cancers, headed by Professor Alistair Forrest. ( Supplied: Harry Perkins Institute )

Professor Forrest said while the technology was already used in some other states, the WA facility would be unique.

"What the Trust has insisted on is that it be collaborative, so we've got all of the major universities, medical research institutes and hospitals in Perth working together to make this thing work," he said.

"We've got 42 members including surgeons, oncologists, cancer researchers, genomic scientists and mathematicians.

"I think the major difference is that we have all of the hospitals on board already that we're going to be generating an atlas of hundreds of different cancer samples and putting this all into an online database."

Director of the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research Professor Peter Leedman said the funding ran over a period of nine years, which meant long-term goals and collaboration.

"It's extraordinary and a wonderful first for WA which will mean we can put the teams in place and follow patients over their journey," Professor Leedman said.

"This is a wonderful opportunity to illustrate collaboration because to solve the bigger issues in cancer we do need to collaborate.