Four highly coveted NHMRC Investigator Grants awarded to Peter Mac researchers
15 December 2023
Dr Abby Douglas, Dr Jovana Maksimovic, Associate Professor Ilia Voskoboinik and Professor Philip Darcy have been awarded NHMRC Investigator Grants totalling over $7.5 million in funding.
The NHMRC is the premier scientific funding body that awards a limited number of Investigator Grants to the highest-performing researchers across Australia.
“I am incredibly proud that once again Peter Mac has above the national average for NHMRC funding,” Peter Mac’s Executive Director of Cancer Research, Professor Ricky Johnstone, said.
“This demonstrates the depth of talent, quality of research and our ability to cover the full spectrum of fundamental, clinical and health services research at Peter Mac.
“I extend my congratulations to the successful researchers and wish them luck with their proposals which are listed below.”
Life threatening infection frequently occurs in patients with low white blood cells following chemotherapy for blood cancer and bone marrow transplants.
Antimicrobials are life-saving, however for over 50 years there has not been a change in the standard procedure to use them at the onset of fever and to continue their use until the white blood cell count has returned to normal.
Fever is not always due to infection and prolonged use of antibiotics is associated with poor outcomes like antibiotic-resistant infection.
This program will study new cutting-edge diagnostic tests and clinical trials of antibiotic cessation to reduce antibiotic use and improve patient care.
Recent technological advances allow us to simultaneously peek inside millions of single cells to understand what they are doing during health and disease. The technology is insightful, but it produces lots of ‘noisy’ data that can be difficult to interpret.
This research program will develop computational methods to improve how data from human single cell samples is analysed, allowing noisy data to be interpreted. This will provide clearer insights into how healthy cells behave and what goes wrong in disease, potentially leading the development of new and or better treatments.
To facilitate broader advances in basic and clinical research the methods, workflows and data will be made publicly available for the global research community.
To provide novel directions for cancer immunotherapy and the treatment of immunodeficient patients, it is important to understand more about a class of white blood cells called cytotoxic lymphocytes. These white blood cells protect us from pathogens and cancer by killing rogue cells. Little is understood about how cytotoxic lymphocytes develop their killing capacity, and how cancer cells develop resistance to these cells.
To understand more about this critical area, a multidisciplinary research program will explore novel regulators of cytotoxic lymphocyte killing, and provide insights into why cancer cells become resistant to immunotherapy and look at ways in which this can be overcome.
Professor Phillip Darcy - ’Development of new strategies for enhancing CAR T cell therapy of cancer’
Immunotherapy, or treatments that stimulate the immune system to fight cancer, have resulted in remarkable benefits for some types of cancer however many remain resistant to all forms of treatment.
To address this issue, a patient's own immune cells (T cells) are modified so they recognise and attack cancer cells. These modified T cells are called Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cells.
CAR T-cell treatment has been successful in treating certain blood cancers but so far has not worked well in solid tumours. This may be because solid tumours create a hostile environment for these CAR T-cells, and they have trouble finding and sticking to the tumour.
This research project aims to overcome the major barriers to the success of immunotherapy by using various genetic and drug-based strategies.
The project will use highly innovative approaches and cutting-edge technologies with the most promising approaches taken into the real clinical setting using the Peter Mac 'National Centre of Excellence in Cellular Immunotherapy'.