TWO Hunter researchers have been awarded $150,000 to take their trials to the next level.
Professor Vanessa McDonald and Dr Gerard Kaiko, both from the University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute, were named as recipients of the 2019 Ramaciotti Awards for Biomedical Research at an awards ceremony in Brisbane on Wednesday night.
They will each receive $150,000 to support their progress in taking their research to a clinical application within five years.
Dr Kaiko said philanthropic grants such as Perpetual's Ramaciotti awards were becoming more and more important, as funding opportunities for innovative medical research in Australia were "pretty dire".
"It's like a drought - there is just not enough funds in the system," he said. "The success rates for most of the national grants are now below about 10 per cent, which means about 90 per cent of the work, or proposed work, is not getting funded.
"So philanthropic grants like this can really help to bridge that gap. At the moment, we really need it."
Dr Kaiko said he would use the grant to extend his research into developing a clinical test to see if patients with cystic fibrosis are likely to respond to one of the "very expensive" drugs before they begin taking it.
"We are taking tiny little biopsies from their colon and their nasal tract and we are growing those out into mini 'organoids' to test drugs for cystic fibrosis on them," he said.
"There are three of these drugs approved, and more coming, so we are going to end up with a situation where we have many different drugs. So this is about figuring out what patients should go on which drug, before they actually start.
"These drugs are over a quarter of a million dollars per patient, per year. So there is a need for personalised screening."
Dr Kaiko said credit should also go to his team - Professor Peter Wark, Dr Thomas Goodsall, Dr Lin Cheng, Dr Douglas Dorahy and Lorissa McGufficke.
Professor McDonald said the grant would allow her to look at a new way of personalising the management of people with severe asthma.
"Severe asthma is occurs in about 3-to-10 per cent of people with asthma, but the burden of illness for that population is really high," she said. "We want to look at characterising the individual in terms of what we call 'treatable traits'. It means we are not applying a blanket approach, but treating individual patients for a range of different characteristics and diseases.
"We have done some pilot work using this approach and we found that people had significantly increased quality of life. Their presentations to the GP improved, and measures of inflammation in the airway, and throughout the body, also improved.
"We know that using this approach is superior to usual care in terms of patient outcomes, but we need to look at this in a larger population to test the effect of the model of care and the intervention. This new approach is, admittedly, more difficult and takes more resources - so we need to look at how we can implement that into a day-to-day clinic setting."
The Ramaciotti Health Investment Grants allocated up to $150,000 to eight recipients in universities, public hospitals or institutes to support their progress in taking their research to clinical application within five years.
It's like a drought - there is just not enough funds in the system
Dr Gerard Kaiko
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