Federal funding to fight cancer and other diseases

The federal government has awarded $8 million to three La Trobe University scientists for research into next-generation immunological and plant-based therapies for cancer and other diseases.

Research groups led by the scientists will play a key role in two new national Australian Research Council (ARC) Cooperative Centres of Excellence. The centres are high-quality collaborations between research bodies, government and business to maintain and develop national priority research of international standing.

Dr Brian Abbey and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Keith Nugent will carry out their work in association with the $28 million ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, based at Monash University.

The centre develops extremely high-resolution imaging technologies to explore the immune system, in order to better understand how it functions and harness it in the fight against cancer and other diseases. La Trobe’s advances in X-ray imaging help achieve this and have already provided highly accurate 3D views of important structures inside biological cells.

Professor Nugent said the government’s latest research support highlights La Trobe’s pre-eminence at the frontier of X-ray science, helping to “build on our connections with world-leading scientific resources such as the X-ray laser facilities at Stanford and in Europe as well as our leadership roles at the Australian Synchrotron”.

Professor of Botany Jim Whelan, a specialist in plant energy metabolism, will lead the La Trobe hub for the $26 million ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology located at the University of Western Australia.

He is part of an international scientific team that recently discovered a new substance in the common weed thale cress which has an important link to human brain chemistry involved in Alzheimer’s disease.