My Cousin Has That

Coming to a laptop near you in the next couple of weeks is the SCS podcast series My Cousin Has That.

Associate Professor Joshua Ooi and Dr Julie Monk discuss their grand plans for preventing and curing autoimmune disease. Sitting alongside autoimmune specialists, clinician scientists, and some pretty amazing patients, they talk about how it’s sometimes not helpful to say “My cousin has that.”

Watch this space!

Dr Joshua Ooi awarded 2019 Ramaciotti Health Investment Grant

Dr Joshua Ooi from the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases has been awarded a 2019 Ramaciotti Health Investment Grant for his research into targeted regulatory cell based therapy to treat lupus.

Dr Joshua Ooi receives 2019 Victorian Tall Poppy Science Award

Professor Eric Morand accepting
Dr Ooi's Tall Poppy Science Award

Dr Joshua Ooi from the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases is the recipient of a 2019 Victorian Tall Poppy Science Award for his outstanding achievements in the area of autoimmune diseases.

Did you know October is National Lupus Awareness Month?

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A step closer to understanding and treating lupus

Dr Joshua Ooi

Monash University researcher Dr Joshua Ooi, alongside co-investigators Professor Eric Morand and Professor Jamie Rossjohn, will be one step closer to developing a potential therapy for lupus, thanks to a highly competitive $400,000 Novel Research Grant awarded by the Lupus Research Alliance.

Regulatory T cells in renal disease

Maliha Alikhan et al. published in Clinical & Translational Immunology.

Read article here.

Renal Dendritic Cells: The Long and Winding Road

Joshua Ooi, Richard Kitching published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Read article here.

C5a receptor 1 promotes autoimmunity, neutrophil dysfunction and injury in experimental anti-myeloperoxidase glomerulonephritis

Jonathan Dick et al. published in Kidney International.

Read article here.

Prestigious Fellowship to improve outcomes for patients with autoimmune disease

Dr Joshua Ooi

Senior Research Fellow Dr Joshua Ooi has been awarded the 2017 Al and Val Rosenstrauss Research Fellowship to further his research into ANCA-associated vasculitis, a severe autoimmune disease that can destroy the kidneys and lungs.

The highly competitive fellowship, worth $400,000 over four years, will enable Dr Ooi to focus on understanding why the immune system sometimes targets self-proteins and causes autoimmune disease.

“Having already identified the precise autoimmune targets in ANCA-associated vasculitis, I will use this fellowship to translate that knowledge into new targeted therapeutics,” said Dr Ooi, from the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases, Department of Medicine, School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health.

“Current treatments for this disease are mainly non-specific immunosuppressants that affect the beneficial parts of the immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to life-threatening infections.”

Professor Richard Kitching, Director of the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases and Monash Health nephrologist said the trouble with current treatments is they’re non-targeted and non-specific and have side effects that lead to significant and substantial morbidities.

“A better way of treating immune diseases would be to more specifically target the bad cells and antibodies—and it’s these rogue cells that direct the damaging autoimmune response that are the focus of Dr Ooi’s research,” Professor Kitching said.

In recent years, Dr. Ooi has made significant breakthroughs in understanding the cause of disease as well as the specific parts of the kidneys and lungs that are ‘attacked’ by the immune system.

His work has been published in prestigious medical and science journals including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Journal of Clinical Investigation as well as in the top kidney research journal, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

“Thanks to this fellowship, I will be able to investigate how we might increase the effectiveness of treatment. I plan to develop new therapies that shut down the part of the immune system that is attacking self-proteins, while leaving protective immunity against invading pathogens intact,” Dr Ooi said.

One of Dr. Ooi’s recent discoveries, published in Nature, details how specific immune cells (known as regulatory T cells) that recognise proteins found in the kidneys and lungs can confer protection from autoimmune disease.

“Based on these findings, I’ve developed new experimental therapies that can induce this protective cell type in patients and I will use this fellowship to translate my experimental findings into a clinical treatment.”

Dominant protection from HLA-linked autoimmunity by antigen-specific regulatory T cells

Joshua Ooi, Richard Kitching et al. published in Nature.

Read article here.

From bench to pet shop to bedside? The environment and immune function in mice

Josh Ooi, Richard Kitching published in Kidney International.

Read article here.

Monash discovery points towards more targeted treatments for vasculitis

Dr Joshua Ooi

Vasculitis that involves autoimmune inflammation of the small blood vessels, may sound relatively harmless. But it’s a condition that can lead to serious organ damage—especially to the kidneys.

Researchers in the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases at Monash University have discovered that a particular immune cell (CD8 T cells) plays an important role in the development of vasculitis.

Published recently in the prestigious Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, the study could lead to the development of improved treatments with fewer side effects for these debilitating

Janet Chang

conditions.

“Vasculitis lacks the profile of other autoimmune diseases, although the incidence in Australia is similar to multiple sclerosis (1/50,000 people) and is most common in people aged 65-74 years,” said co-lead researcher Dr Joshua Ooi. 

One of the problems with the treatment of vasculitis is that there aren’t therapies that are both effective and have a low chance of side effects.

“Without treatment, 80 per cent of patients with vasculitis die within five years. Even with treatment, around 30 per cent of patients die, and half of those die from complications relating to the life-saving treatments given,” said Dr Ooi.

Co-lead researcher and Centre for Inflammatory Diseases’ Director Professor Kitching said that a few years ago, colleagues at the University of Cambridge recognised that a particular genetic signature in CD8 T cells could predict who would get bad disease and who would get less severe disease.

“While the Cambridge discovery had the potential to determine which vasculitis patients would need more intensive and less intensive treatment, no one had determined whether these cells themselves might be important in the disease,” said Professor Kitching.

“Our paper has shown for the first time that CD8 cells, a type of immune cell that usually kill our cells after they are infected by viruses, actually do play a damaging role in vasculitis.”

Currently, vasculitis patients receive a one-size-fits-all type of therapy, with some being over-treated and others under-treated.

First author and School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health (SCS) PhD student Ms Janet Chang said that as these CD8 cells themselves emerge as targets in immune disease, we may develop better treatments with fewer side effects than the current non-specific immune suppressive drugs.

“We believe our study is a further step along the road to more specific, more targeted, and more effective treatments for this difficult to treat disease,” said Professor Kitching.

This work was funded by an NHMRC Project Grant.   Watch a short video about this research here.

CD8+ T Cells Effect Glomerular Injury in Experimental Anti-Myeloperoxidase GN

Janet Chang, Joshua Ooi et al. published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Read article here.

The NLRP3 inflammasome in kidney disease and autoimmunity

Holly Hutton et al. published in Nephrology.

Read article here.