Fellowship funding for Alzheimer's and leukaemia research

Source: labonline.com.au --- Sunday, October 16, 2016
Biotechnology company CSL has announced the inaugural recipients of its Centenary Fellowships, established to support Australia’s best and brightest biomedical researchers. The lucky awardees were Professor Geoff Faulkner and Associate Professor Steven Lane, each of whom received a $1.25 million, five-year fellowship to advance their own groundbreaking research. Professor Faulkner, from The University of Queensland , thinks long-term memory might be stored in the brain’s DNA. He has already shown that the DNA in our brains is different to that in the rest of our bodies and that it changes as we learn. With the CSL Centenary Fellowship he’ll test the idea on brain tissue donated by Alzheimer’s patients to determine if DNA is involved in memory formation, and what the implications of this might be for people living with Alzheimer’s. Associate Professor Lane, from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute , wants to tailor leukaemia treatments to reduce relapse rates in older patients. He has already developed a method to rapidly profile the genetics of leukaemia types and model them in the lab, allowing him to map the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments against the genomes of individual cancers. He will use the fellowship to identify new drug pathways and explore repurposing existing drugs to target resistant leukaemia types. The fellowships were established this year in celebration of CSL’s 100th anniversary. Two five-yea ...

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