Meet the Australian Life Scientist of the Year: Ben Kile

Dr Benjamin Kile of the The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute has received the prestigious Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year for work in understanding the causes of cancer and for providing insight into the mechanisms that keep blood platelets alive.

He will be awarded the prize by the Innovation Minister Senator Kim Carr in a ceremony in Canberra tonight.

Kile's work came to prominence in 2008 when he and his team identified the function of the ERG gene and its roll in regulating blood stem cells.

“Everybody knew that the Erg gene was highly oncogenic - it is probably the most commonly rearranged gene in human cancer - but we didn’t know what its day job was,” Kile said.

“Our research showed that Erg is a regulator of blood stem cells, which immediately tells you something about why it’s so oncogenic. Cancers acquire a lot of characteristics of stem cells, so the fact that it is switched on in tumours suddenly made sense.”

More recently he investigated the mysterious mechanisms that underlie the life and death of blood platelets.

The prevailing theory, developed over 50 years, was the 'mulitple-hit' hypothesis, which suggested that progressive external damage to platelets eventually result in them being recognised and cleared by the reticuloendothelial system.

However, Kile and his team showed that platelets have an internal 'timer', governed by opposing forces, that eventually leads to their demise.

“We initially discovered that a protein called Bcl-xL is responsible for keeping platelets alive,” Kile said.

“That led to us breaking open the whole molecular pathway. We found that it is a real yin and yang situation. On the one side you have Bcl-xL, which keeps platelets alive, and on the other you have Bak, a pro-death protein that kills them.

"The two are in balance in a healthy platelet, but as it circulates, Bcl-xL slowly runs out, like sand in an hourglass. When the sands runs out, Bak kills the platelet, triggering its removal from the blood”.

The hope is that this deeper understanding of platelets will lead to therapeutics that can block the death routines and drugs that target other cells.

"It may be able to keep other cell types alive, such as neurons following a stroke or cardiac cells after a heart attack," said Kile.

A better understanding of the proteins that regulate the cells that produce platelets could also be beneficial in chemotherapy treatments, which are damaging to platelets.

Australian Life Scientist would like to congratulate Dr Ben Kile for receiving the Life Scientist of the Year award.