Centenary

Using diet to cope with the aftermath of stroke

Connie Wong 1_LR$25,000 Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize goes to young Melbourne researcher

One of Australia’s most creative young medical researchers has won a $25,000 prize to help her develop her ideas on how diet could prevent stroke deaths.

Connie Wong thinks we may be able to prevent early deaths following stroke with a fibre-based diet. She initially used innovative microscope techniques to determine how stroke weakens the immune system. Now she is studying how it also induces leakiness in the gut wall, leading to infection and an upsurge in deaths. And the solution may well lie in diet.

[continue reading…]

Keeping our best young bioscience brains in Australia

Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize to be announced, finalists from Melbourne and Sydney

The winner of the Centenary Institute Lawrence Creative Prize will be announced at 6.30 pm, Tuesday 12 November 2013, at a reception hosted by UBS in Sydney.

There are three finalists. On Tuesday we will find out who is the overall winner of the $25,000 prize. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000.

[continue reading…]

Diabetes drugs must be precisely targeted


When enzyme inhibiting drugs to treat diabetes were being developed, Mark Gorrell warned that care was needed to ensure the drugs targeted a specific enzyme, leaving other members of the enzyme family unaffected.

Thankfully, his warning was heeded by drug companies.

Associate Professor Mark Gorrell and his team of liver researchers at Sydney’s Centenary Institute have now confirmed that the diabetes drugs and potential cancer therapies based on regulating the dipeptidyl peptidase (DPP) family of enzymes must be carefully targeted to avoid serious side effects such as skin and intestinal damage.

[continue reading…]

Fixing the body’s leaky pipes

Centenary’s discoveries lead to a commercial agreement to create drugs to fix leaking blood vesselsci-logo

Australian molecular biologists led by researchers at Centenary have made a synthetic compound that appears to allow them to control the leakiness of blood vessels. The work could lead to effective new drug treatments for strokes and tumours. Spinoffs may include an ability to reduce the side-effects of chemotherapy and inflammation.

Their lead drug candidate, known as CD5-2, was developed with the assistance of Mirrx Therapeutics, a privately owned Danish biotechnology company. Today Centenary has signed an agreement to develop this and other potential drugs with Mirrx. The agreement was facilitated by Bio-Link Australia Pty Ltd.

[continue reading…]

A human systems biology centre for Sydney

Ramaciotti invests $1 million in a new approach to understanding human disease

ci-logo

“We’ll be able to ask individual immune cells where they’ve been and who they’ve been talking to…”

The University of Sydney and The Centenary Institute will establish the Ramaciotti Centre for Human Systems Biology in 2014 following the announcement earlier this evening of the $1 million Ramaciotti Biomedical Research Award.

[continue reading…]

Prostate cancer’s Achilles’ heel uncovered

‘The Holst effect’ opens up new therapeutic options for prostate cancer treatment.

ci-logo

24 September 2013

A team of researchers from Sydney, Vancouver, Adelaide and Brisbane are getting closer to a new treatment for prostate cancer that relies on starving tumours of essential nutrients they need to grow.

In work just published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Dr Jeff Holst, from Sydney’s Centenary Institute and his colleagues have shown they can slow the growth of the cancer by blocking the proteins which pump the amino acid leucine into tumour cells.

[continue reading…]

How ‘junk DNA’ can control cell development

Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney’s Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being “junk”, the 97 per cent of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development.

And in doing so, the researchers have unravelled a previously unknown mechanism for regulating the activity of genes, increasing our understanding of the way cells develop and opening the way to new possibilities for therapy.

[continue reading…]

Hope for Hep C cure no excuse for risk-taking, expert warns

Australian liver disease specialists available for World Hepatitis Day interviews

Exciting early indications of a cure for Hepatitis C do not mean we should become complacent about the risks of contracting the debilitating disease, a leading Australian researcher warns.

Professor Geoff McCaughan, head of the Liver Immunobiology Program at Sydney’s Centenary Research Institute, says preliminary results of a newly developed oral treatment regime for liver transplant patients with Hepatitis C were showing promising results.

[continue reading…]