Fellowship funding for Alzheimer's and leukaemia research

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-year fellowships will be awarded each calendar year for 10 years, with each $1.25 million award paid in annual instalments of $250,000 to the employing institute. They will be primarily awarded for discovery and translational research with a focus on rare and serious diseases, immunology and inflammation.

“Our Centenary Fellowships honour CSL’s long legacy of contributing to innovative medicines, particularly for patients suffering serious diseases,” said CSL CEO and Managing Director Paul Perreault.

“We’re extremely proud to support research that holds the potential to save and change many lives.”

Image caption: CSL Centenary Fellows Steven Lane (L) and Geoff Faulkner (R) with CSL Chairman John Shine.