Associate Professor Jake Shortt and co-authors recognised for research excellence

Assoc Prof Shortt

Clinician Researcher at the Monash Health Translation Precinct (MHTP), Associate Professor Jake Shortt and his co-authors are recipients of the 2015 Joseph Sambrook Award for Research Excellence.

The Sambrook Award is awarded to the researchers at Peter Mac who were the principal authors of a paper considered by an independent panel to be the 'best' published from Peter Mac in a peer-reviewed journal over the two previous calendar years (in this instance, 2013 and 2014).

The criteria for award are research excellence, actual or potential clinical impact and work considered to be of 'paradigm shifting' nature.

Until a few months ago a Senior Research Fellow at Peter Mac, Associate Professor Shortt relocated to MHTP to be at the ‘coal face’ of translational research, allowing him to conduct basic scientific research in tandem with clinical trial activity.

Associate Professor Shortt is now running a translational research group in malignant haematology at the MHTP and is clinical lead at Monash Health for leukaemia and myelodysplasia.

The paper for which Associate Professor Shortt received the Sambrook Award is: The drug vehicle and solvent, N-methylpyrrolidone is an epigenetic immunomodulator and anti-myeloma compound. Cell Reports 2014; 7:1009-19.

“Our paper reports the surprising discovery that N-methylpyrrolidone, which has been used to formulate a wide variety of drug preparations for many years and had been considered relatively biologically inert, has significant activity in a preclinical myeloma model,” said Associate Professor Shortt.

“We explored the mechanism and identified that NMP has immunomodulatory activity and modifies gene expression through an epigenetic mechanism and this work has since led to a Phase I clinical trial of NMP in refractory multiple myeloma and a drug development program that aims to produce more potent anti-cancer agents based on NMP.”