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| Dr Gan, Dr Hutton, Dr Ooi and Dr Grynberg |
Early career Investigators from the Centre of
Inflammatory Diseases made their mark at the recent Annual Scientific Meeting
of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Nephrology (ANZSN), winning and
being first runner up in the awards for early translational research at the Darwin
event last month.
Monash University PhD candidates and nephrologists Dr Holly
Hutton and Dr Keren Grynberg, and Postdoctoral research fellows Dr Josh Ooi and
Dr Poh Yi Gan each received highly competitive awards for their outstanding
research.
Consultant nephrologist Dr Hutton was the winner of the
Young Investigator Award, the 10th consecutive year a researcher from CID has
received this prestigious prize.
The focus of Dr Hutton’s research is MPO-ANCA vasculitis, an
autoimmune disease in which the body loses the ability to determine what is
'self'.
“This disease causes the immune system to attack blood vessels, resulting in inflammation and damage to a variety of organs,
including the kidneys, lungs and skin,” Dr Hutton said.
Kidney involvement bodes poorly for patients, who may go on
to develop end stage kidney disease, and current treatments are non-specific,
and have significant side effects.
“My research defined a damaging role for a protein complex
called the NLRP3 inflammasome, that helps ‘sound the alarm’ in infection but in
inflammatory diseases can have a dark side. I showed that inflammasome
activation in the context of vasculitis is damaging,” Dr Hutton said.
“We now have new drugs that block inflammasome activation,
potentially providing more targeted, less toxic therapies for patients with
vasculitis.”
Fellow PhD candidate and Monash Health nephrologist Dr
Grynberg received the first Runner-Up Young Investigator Award in the same
category for her research into kidney injury.
“Kidney
disease affects one in ten Australian adults and carries a significant personal
as well as economic burden,” Dr Grynberg said.
“At
present there are no targeted treatments for episodes of sudden kidney failure
or its progression to long term kidney disease.”
“Inflammation
and scarring are the main processes in the kidney that lead to impairment in
kidney function.”
Dr
Grynberg’s research focuses on a pathway within cells, the JNK pathway, that causes
inflammation, scarring and injury in the kidney.
“By
blocking this pathway using new medications we hope to protect the kidney from
injury in vulnerable situations such as cardiac surgery or during kidney
transplants,” Dr Grynberg said.
Meanwhile postdoctoral researcher Dr Ooi took out the ANZSN
Basic Science Award. He presented his work that was recently published in the world’s
top science journal Nature. The studies showed how a key genetic risk
factor for autoimmune disease could protect people from the risk of developing
disease.
The work shows the protective power of cells, known as
regulatory T cells, that are specific for disease causing proteins.
“Ultimately, I hope my research leads to targeted
therapeutic outcomes that limit the use of global immunosuppression,” Dr Ooi
said.
In further success, Dr Gan received the first Runner Up in same
Basic Science Award for her research that aims to improve outcomes for patients
with ANCA-associated glomerulonephritis, an inflammatory autoimmune disease.
“ANCA-associated glomerulonephritis is an important cause of
renal failure and current therapies are limited and with significant side
effects,” Dr Gan said.
“The recent development of biological therapeutics, such as
antibodies against messenger proteins called cytokines, opens the door for more
specific treatments for ANCA-associated vasculitis.”
“First, however, we need to understand which cytokines are the key
targets. My work has provided proof of principle that these more specific
therapies can be applied to this disease.”
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