Associate Professor Louise Cheng Wins Top NHMRC Ideas Grant
27 March 2025
Peter Mac Associate Professor Louise Cheng has taken out the 2024 NHMRC Marshall and Warren Ideas Grant Award for the highest scoring Ideas Grant.
The Group Leader’s award-winning application will examine how cancer tumours grow at the expense of other tissues in a side effect of cancer called cachexia.
Cachexia is a metabolic syndrome of weight loss that affects 80 percent of people with advanced cancer.
Associate Professor Cheng explained that as tumours develop and their metabolic demand increases the tumour turns to using the body’s muscle and fat for energy to grow.
“There are currently no effective treatments or ways for diagnosing cachexia yet it significantly impacts a patient’s ability to withstand treatment,” she said.
“We will use both patient samples and a Drosophila fly model of cancer cachexia to help us understand how organs communicate with each other and to help us find out how the competition for resources between tumours and ‘other’ tissues can drive cancer cachexia.
“It is important for us to comprehend how tumours send signals that lead to the breakdown of muscle and fat, and to fully understand why such a process is beneficial for the tumour.
“Understanding these processes will help us develop targeted interventions that could alleviate cachexia.”
The research project is a collaboration between Associate Professor Cheng’s lab and clinical collaborators Dr Hyun Ko from Cancer Imaging, and Professor Sandy Heriot from Cancer Surgery. The collaboration illustrates the bench to bed-side approach that is taken at Peter Mac.
The ultimate aim for Associate Professor Cheng is to uncover biomarkers that can be used to detect cachexia early, as well as interventions that can mitigate or prevent the devastating effects of this syndrome.
Associate Professor Cheng is the Head of Stem Cell Growth Regulation Laboratory at Peter Mac and a Group Leader at the Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology and the Department of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Melbourne.
