2024 Rising Star Award Recipients

Type 1 diabetes is caused by the killing of insulin producing cells in the pancreas by cells of the body’s own immune system. Type 1 diabetes places an enormous burden on patients, their families and the healthcare system.

Although lifesaving, insulin is not a cure, as it does not address the cause of the disease.

I will be using information that has come from the development of immune therapies in cancer, to find new ways to disarm the immune cells that cause type 1 diabetes.

My overall aim is to develop a short-term therapy that provides robust and long-lived protection from type 1 diabetes.

Dr Gaurang Jhala is an immunologist using his skills to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and pathways involved in type 1 diabetes and to identify new treatments for its prevention.

Jhala competed his PhD at SVI in 2016, having worked previously in Germany in the biotech industry.

Acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, is a type of blood cancer in which the bone marrow makes too many abnormal white blood cells. These cells crowd the bone marrow, preventing it from making normal blood cells. They can also spill out into the bloodstream and circulate around the body. Due to their immaturity they are unable to function properly to prevent or fight infection. Inadequate numbers of red cells and platelets being made by the marrow can cause anemia, easy bleeding, and/or bruising.

Recently, a new gene mutation called UBTF-tandem duplications has been identified, marking a new sub-type of aggressive AML. The exact way this mutation accelerates AML progression is unknown. I will use patient bone marrow samples to understand how this mutation alters protein synthesis to promote AML progression.

Dr Rhynelle Dmello is a cancer cell biologist who is applying her skills to help develop new treatments for ovarian cancer.

Rhynelle did her PhD at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute, graduating in 2024.

In Australia there are just under 150,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed every year. It is a leading cause of death – killing almost 50,000 Australians annually. One in two Australian men and women will be diagnosed with cancer by the age of 85.

Natural killer cells form part of the body’s first line defence against pathogens and cancer. The cells detect small changes on the surface of infected or cancerous cells, which triggers a chain reaction that leads to the death of the abnormal cell.

Cancers have developed mechanisms to avoid detection by natural killer cells, allowing the cancer cells to grow and spread unchecked. We aim to develop an engineered protein containing antibody fragments that acts like a homing beacon, able to recruit natural killer cells to the surface of cancer cells, targeting them for destruction.

I have teamed up with the Visvanathan lab in the St Vincent’s Hospital Department of Medicine to tackle liver cancer for our initial proof-of-concept studies, using patient derived organoids they have developed in their lab. We will match the liver cancer to a patient’s own natural killer cells to test the effectiveness of the strategy.

Dr Chris Langendorf is a structural biologist with a strong background in X-ray crystallography and biophysical analysis. Chris is using his skills to hone particular immune cells to liver cancer.

Chris completed his PhD at Monash University in 2015, joining SVI’s Protein Chemistry and Metabolism Lab.

Touch is how we interact with the world, hugging friends, and family, holding our phones, avoiding bumping into the coffee table and the bruise that follows.

People who are affected by severe trauma, burns, chronic wounds (due to diabetes), and surgical cancer removal often require reconstructive skin flap surgery. This surgery takes healthy skin from elsewhere on the body to fill in the gap caused by surgery.

As the healthy skin flap’s nerves have been severed from the central nervous system, the patient loses feeling in that area.

We are developing an alternative to surgical skin harvest, by growing skin in the lab from blood cells turned into stem cells. Previously, I have successfully grown skin from human stem cells. Further to this research, I will be incorporating nerves to restore feeling to the lab-generated skin.

Dr Kate Firipis is a tissue engineer, with extensive cellular and biomaterial experience. Kate is working to bioengineer skin that can be used to heal complex wounds.

Kate worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Swinburne University, after having graduated with a PhD from RMIT in 2022.

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic autoimmune disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks and destroys the insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. As a result, the body cannot produce enough insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar levels, and people with type 1 diabetes require daily insulin injections or the use of an insulin pump to survive.

Transplantation is one way of replacing the insulin-producing cells lost in type 1 diabetes. However, transplants have a high failure rate and a multitude of risks due to the introduction of foreign cells to the body.

My project aims to create islets from a patients own stem cells – thus reducing the risk of transplant rejection and eliminating the need for immunosuppressive drugs.

This novel approach allows for a scalable and personalised treatment for type 1 diabetes whilst drastically increasing the availability of these life-saving tissue transplants for people with type 1 diabetes.

Dr Kurt Brassington is a biomedical scientist with a strong interest in stem cells. In his research, he is harnessing the power of stem cells to provide a regenerative therapy for pancreatic tissue destroyed in type 1 diabetes.

Kurt has worked at The Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute and RMIT University as a postdoctoral researcher, since graduating with his PhD in 2021.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. It is a devastating disease caused by a build-up of proteins in the brain, called amyloid plaques. The amyloid plaques stop our brain cells from communicating with each other, by forming large protein blockages that stop the electrical communication signals our brain cells use to work properly.

Alzheimer’s disease starts as mild memory loss and over a period of 20 years or more, slowly progresses to personality changes, and severe memory issues, where affected elderly people can no longer carry on a simple conversation or complete basic daily living tasks.

There is currently no cure or effective treatment for the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s disease.

In this project I will focus on a protein called phospholipase D3, which has been found surrounding the amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease brain cells and is thought to be involved in creating the plaques.

I am trying to make medicines that change the way that phospholipase D3 behaves. Firstly, we need to know exactly where phospholipase D3 is located in the brain cells. Understanding this will give us important information to allow us to design medicines with the correct chemical properties to reach phospholipase D3. This is a bit like knowing the correct address to use when sending a letter to make sure it gets to the right recipient.

Once we know this, I will test the effect of boosting or blocking the activity of phospholipase D3 to see if we can help break apart and clear the number of amyloid plaques made in the brain. By doing this, we will confirm that we can target phospholipase D3 and determine if these medicines are useful for treating one of the symptoms of the Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr Emma van der Westhuizen is a molecular pharmacologist, working to develop and characterise new drug candidates for the treatment of dementia.

Emma did her PhD at Monash University, and carried out subsequent postdoctoral studies at the University of Montreal in Canada and at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Blood cell recovery following cancer therapy is slow and associated with an increased risk of bleeding, infection and, in severe cases, death. In addition to targeting cancer cells, the treatments also damage healthy cells, including those cells required to support blood cell production.

The bone marrow acts like a factory with different parts (aka niches) responsible for making billions of blood cells every day. Blood stem cells produce specialised progenitor cells during the process of blood cell production and different niche cells are responsible for different stages of production.

These niches consist of non-blood cells and each niche supports the production of distinct blood cell types. Damage to these cells from cancer therapies can cause considerable issues.

I will use an innovative advanced 9-colour imaging technology to identify which niche cells are important for the regulation of the blood progenitor cells using our mouse model of cancer therapies. The gene expression of the niche cells will be analysed to determine how cancer treatments alter their behaviour and to discover novel regulatory factors produced by the niche cells. This will improve our understanding on bone marrow niche cell biology that will be beneficial to other researchers in the field. The goal is to assist in blood cell recovery in patients post-treatment.

Dr Gavin Tjin is microscopist, using his passion for microscopic techniques to solve biological questions – including how cells interact with their environment and how disease and treatment can alter these interactions.

Gavin joined SVI’s Stem Cell Regulation Laboratory in 2017 as a postdoctoral researcher. He completed his PhD at Sydney’s Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in 2016.