Discovery And Development Of Novel Venom Peptide Analgesics
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$763,845.00
Summary
Professor Lewis will discover and develop new research tools and potential therapeutics from toxins acting on pain pathways. The Fellowship will leverage (i) well-funded collaborations with top Australian and international scientists (ii) the recently established IMB Centre for Pain Research that I lead as inaugural Director, and (iii) an outstanding Institute equipped with leading edge technologies for high throughput and high content discovery and proteomic and transcriptomic analysis.
Mechanobiology Of Epithelial Homeostasis In Health And Disease
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$876,005.00
Summary
Epithelial tissues, such as the lung, fundamentally protect the body from its external environment. For this, they must detect and respond to danger. My work has discovered a new biological system where cells monitor changes in mechanical forces as a sign of danger. Diseases such as inflammation and cancer occur when this detection system fails. This Fellowship builds on my lab’s pioneering work to understand how force is used to sense danger, and how disease occurs when it goes awry.
Peripheral Membrane Proteins In Health And Disease
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$640,210.00
Summary
Peripheral membrane proteins are critical for processes such as cell transport, signaling, neurosecretion and development. As such, their dysfunction can lead to many debilitating diseases including cancer, inflammation and neurodegeneration. This project will establish fundamental new knowledge about how peripheral membrane proteins regulate cell function, how their perturbation or mutation results in human disease, and will inform efforts to target them for future therapeutic outcomes.
Unlocking The Health Effects Of Sitting To Reduce Chronic Disease
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$638,517.00
Summary
This fellowship involves a series of studies that will fill gaps in evidence to inform national and international public health and clinical guideline recommendations on sitting time. It will provide crucial evidence on dose-response relationships, underlying mechanisms and the feasibility of making the relevant behavioural changes, providing more-precise evidence-based contributions to the development of public health policy and guidelines on sitting time.
Translational Genomics And Combinatorial Drug Discovery To Improve Outcomes For Patients With Colorectal Cancer
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$640,210.00
Summary
Bowel cancer is a major public health burden in Australia. Over the next 5 years, A/Prof Sieber’s research will focus on understanding the molecular pathology of bowel cancer and how this determines the course of disease and response to therapy. Integrated genomic, functional and drug discovery studies will provide significant new insights into fundamental tumour biology and open up new avenues for diagnosis and treatment.
This fellowship is to support Professor Stephen Kent in generating new advances in vaccines to prevent HIV (the cause of AIDS) and Influenza (“The Flu”). HIV causes over 1.5 million deaths per year and no vaccine is currently available. Influenza causes around half a million deaths per year. Although the current Influenza vaccine is partially effective, improvements are needed for it to be able to protect against the many different strains of Influenza that can cause infection.
I am an infectious diseases physician and virologist/immunologist focused on developing and testing vaccines against the AIDS virus. I intend to achieve this by advancing novel vaccine concepts that stimulate broad and potent immunity and evaluating these vaccines in rigorous laboratory models and then moving them towards clinical trials.
Variation in our genetic makeup can cause serious brain disorders such as epilepsy. The goal of this research is to determine how variation in an epilepsy patients genes produce fundamental changes in brain function that lead to epilepsy. This is a multidisciplinary program that combines clinical, genetic, electrophysiological, morphological and computational approaches to create a fundamental understanding of the genesis of this important disease.
Antigen-presenting cells control immune responses. Different types of these cells do different jobs and affect different diseases. We wish to control these processes by determining how the cells live and die. In particular we are interested in controlling the local immune responses during rejection of islet transplantation, which can cure type 1 diabetes.
Translating Oocyte Biology Discoveries To New Clinical Practices
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$772,605.00
Summary
A/Professor Gilchrist is a reproductive biologist studying factors that regulate the intrinsic quality of unfertilised eggs. He has produced and patented the use of unique growth factors produced by the egg that enhance egg quality in women. Bringing together industry and a world-leading clinic, he is developing new forms of hormone-free infertility treatment which he will take to clinical practice over the next 5 years.