Garvan reaps surprise windfall

The Garvan Institute celebrated 40 years of sharp end research into cancer and associated diseases last week -- and in the process gained over $1million in research funds.

The money, $1.25 million, was pledged by fundraising at the 40th celebration dinner. It will be sunk into a new department at the Garvan Institute dedicated to investigating real-time cell level reactions.

"The new department will be a state of the art Functional Molecular Cinematography Unit (FMCU)," said Garvan spokesperson Suzy Freebury. "The attendees at the dinner knew we had a target to raise money for it, but we exceeded that massively," she added.

The FMCU will use cutting edge world-standard technology, and will be the only one of its kind in Australia. It will be used to allow researchers to look inside living cells, and to see how individual molecules react with each other, said Freebury.

"It will let them see into cells in real time and in 3D," she said. "Organisms can be studied at cell level across periods ranging anything between milliseconds to days, and (researchers) will be able to define molecular interactions in live cells down to as small as six nanometres," she added.

Keynote speaker at the celebration dinner was professor Fiona Stanley, Companion of the Order of Australia. High profile attendees included Lady Fairfax and the Garvan's professor John Shine.

Stanley's keynote address dealt with the issues of co-operative working across institutes and research establishments. She noted that the larger, more established institutes had an obligation to work with smaller establishments to further the overall advance of research.

"It is nice to see your individual work published in Nature and so on, but I'm sure we would make more progress working together," she said.

The funds raised included a $500,000 donation from Lady Fairfax, a matching amount from a private undisclosed benefactor, and the remainder from pledges, raffles and auctions.

"We were delighted with the incredible response from our friends and attendees," asserted Freebury. "It was amazing, and the money from Lady Fairfax in particular was completely unexpected," she added.