Dr Anthony Bosco, Professor Steve Stick, Professor Andrew Whitehouse, Dr Raelene Endersby and
Dr Luke Garratt know how fortunate they are to have their research backed by philanthropists
Sometimes the hardest part of research is finding and funding good people. At The Kids Research Institute Australia, the excellent standard of research is underpinned by the work of some of the best and brightest research minds recruited from all over the world. And, it is all made possible by a community of generous donors.
Through Fellowships they have provided the funds needed to help attract and retain some of the Institute’s leading researchers. This can be in the form of a short, sharp project over several weeks or it could be for a large-scale undertaking that lasts several years.
Fellowships have also proved useful in pursuing important international collaborations that deepen the understanding of childhood diseases.
Founder and Patron Fiona Stanley said Fellowships were vital to the Institute’s ongoing success.
“They fund the future of our research strength and they are so hard to get via other granting agencies like the National Health and Medical Research Council,” she said.
“These are our future research leaders and will work on the cutting-edge of research looking to solve the really tough problems — for example, what can be done to reduce Indigenous suicides and incarceration? Why is allergy increasing and how do we decrease it? What are the harmful effects of mobile phones? Why are some birth defects increasing? What does increased genetic risk really mean for common diseases? And many more questions.”
Represented below are a few examples of philanthropically-funded Fellowships.
Simon Lee Fellow in Personalised Medicine for Children
Dr Anthony Bosco
Why does the immune system offer too little protection against infection in some people and yet overreact, causing disease in others? Why doesn’t it seek out and destroy cancer cells? These are some of the fundamental questions that systems immunologist Dr Anthony Bosco seeks to answer in his ground-breaking work at The Kids Research Institute Australia.
Anthony, who is the Simon Lee Fellow in Personalised Medicine for Children, hopes to unravel the mysteries of the immune system by using genomic profiling to understand how genes work together to orchestrate an immune response.
The immune system is the body’s first line of defence against external threats from pathogens like viruses and bacteria and it also responds to internal threats such as changes to normal functioning and homeostasis.
Already Anthony has made significant inroads into the understanding of immunological function in a range of diseases including allergy, asthma and cancer, and his work has opened the door to new possibilities for therapeutic intervention.
Each person’s genetic code holds the molecular secrets that determine the function and behaviour of the immune system and their susceptibility to disease.
“Interpreting the genetic code which is three billion characters in length is a formidable challenge, and I am grateful the Simon Lee Foundation is supporting me to address this challenge head-on,” he said. “Without this funding it would not be possible to do this work right here in Perth.”
Brainchild Fellow
Dr Raelene Endersby
A cancer diagnosis at any age is devastating but when it is a child’s life at stake it can be particularly heart wrenching.
The cancers that affect children are generally not the same as those that affect adults, and yet, sadly, most of the research focus, and consequently the treatments developed, are for adult diseases.
It is this disparity that drives Raelene Endersby, the inaugural Brainchild Fellow.
Dr Endersby, who returned to Perth from the United States in 2011 to help establish the Brain Tumour Research Program at The Kids Research Institute Australia’s Cancer Centre, has dedicated her career to finding new ways to treat aggressive paediatric brain cancers. At present, her focus is on drug repurposing.
Using precious tumour cells donated by patients at Princess Margaret Hospital and specialised equipment, her team is able to robotically screen thousands of medicines and chemicals originally developed for adults, and even other diseases, to test their efficacy in paediatric cancers.
Dr Endersby said her Fellowship was a result of tireless grassroots fundraising by The Adventurers, specifically their black-tie Brainchild Ball.
“They have supported the important work underway at the Institute’s Brain Tumour Research Laboratory for some time and the Brainchild Fellowship is recognition that crucial to success is finding and keeping the right people,” she said.
“It is pleasing that the community can see the vision that we have and see what we are trying to achieve and that they want to support that.”
Rothwell Family Fellow in Translational Cystic Fibrosis Research
Dr Luke Garratt
Living with cystic fibrosis involves a relentless daily routine of nebulisers, physiotherapy and up to 40 pills a day. Often it can mean hospitalisation and at minimum, requires a number of specialist visits to monitor health each year.
Early-career researcher Dr Luke Garratt, the newly appointed Rothwell Family Fellow in Translational Cystic Fibrosis Research, hopes to help ease this huge burden of care and at the same time provide better insight into progress of this incurable disease.
During his two-year Fellowship, Dr Garratt will investigate how technology could help make monitoring of CF routine in the home, so that it could be performed on a weekly or even daily basis.
At present, standard monitoring methods are invasive which mean they can’t be done outside a specialist clinic or very often.
Dr Garratt has been collaborating with physicists at Macquarie University to explore how smartphone cameras could be used to read common laboratory assays, including those for biomarkers of CF.
Now, he is working towards a future where CF patients and their families could non-invasively test their breath for biomarkers that could be automatically forwarded to their healthcare professionals.
Dr Garratt’s ambitious target is to have a working product for CF families to field-test in 2019.
The Rothwell Family Trust, led by John Rothwell and his daughter Donna, is a long-term philanthropic supporter of the Institute.
Dr Garratt said the Fellowship allowed him to focus on creating the technology that would permit better monitoring and improved quality of life for people with CF.
“A Fellowship not only removes the need to spend valuable time finding next year’s salary and the anxiety that goes with that but having this Fellowship makes my grant applications to fund the technology for this project much more competitive.”
Ethan Davies Fellowship
Dr Sam Greenall
Ependymoma is a rare brain cancer that, sadly, doesn’t often make it into the research spotlight. However, a grassroots fundraising campaign led by the courageous family of Ethan Davies, a young boy diagnosed with the disease in 2012, is set to change that.
The campaign has helped establish the inaugural Ethan Davies Fellowship, awarded to respected cancer researcher Sam Greenall, which provides for a six week-residency at The Kids Research Institute Australia that is designed to help super-charge the research focus on ependymoma.
To date, there has been little research on the cancer, which affects the cells that line the spinal canal and the ventricles of the brain, and there is currently no specific, targeted therapy to treat it.
Dr Greenall will attempt to grow patient-derived ependymoma cells in a dish in the lab, an achievement that has so far eluded researchers.
If successful, it will mean the cultures could be used to rapidly screen new drug treatments and quickly identify which ones are most effective at restricting growth and killing cancer cells.
At present, ependymoma tumours can only be grown in mice, which makes the process of drug discovery slow and laborious.
“Unfortunately, these things are borne out of life- changing events for these families and yet they show the same passion and dedication for tackling these diseases as we would in the lab, so it is a privilege to be working alongside them in a joint effort to try to eradicate this disease,” Dr Greenall, who works at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research, said.
The McCusker Clinical Fellow in Aboriginal Child Health Research
Dr James Fitzpatrick
Areas in Western Australia have some of the highest rates of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) in the world so it is only right that The Kids leads the way in ground-breaking research that is helping prevent, diagnose and manage the condition.
The Institute’s Dr James Fitzpatrick is a respected authority on the subject and is working on the frontline, pioneering programs and working with communities to help give children the best start to life.
FASD is a potent driver of childhood developmental disability. It is the result of exposure of the unborn child to alcohol, to a point that it damages a fetus’ developing brain and central nervous system.
Former Governor Malcolm McCusker and wife Tonya have long been supporters of James’ work, ever since the former infantry soldier turned paediatrician and child health researcher showed them first-hand the effects of FASD on children in the Fitzroy community.
That ultimately led to James’s work being supported by the McCusker Foundation, with James being awarded a McCusker Fellowship in Aboriginal Child Health Research.
According to James, this support had been incredibly important. “Without this support, vital programs such as ‘Making FASD History’ simply couldn’t get off the ground,” he said.
“Success in the Fitzroy Valley, where rates of drinking in pregnancy have reduced in the time that the Institute has partnered with communities to prevent FASD, have led to the program being expanded into the Pilbara and to communities throughout Australia.”
The Feilman Fellow of Genomics
Dr Timo Lassmann
Big data and machine learning has become increasingly important in medical research, particularly in the development of targeted, individualised treatments. Computational biologist Timo Lassmann, a core member of The Kids Research Institute Australia’s Centre for Personalised Medicine for Children, is one of Australia’s leading experts in the analysis of biological data.
Timo has been a leading member in two of the largest international projects in life sciences (ENCODE and FANTOM) that followed the human genome project, and his research has been widely published and cited by other researchers around the world.
Timo’s appointment at the Institute as the Feilman Fellow of Genomics allows him to further his work in decoding and interpreting the genomes of children to predict, prevent and treat their diseases.
“This Fellowship enables me and my team to build upon our academic discoveries to improve the health outcomes of children suffering from rare diseases and cancer,” he said.
Timo is also looking to apply the latest genomic technologies that allow researchers to look at the activity of genes in individual disease and normal cells. “We will be able to explore how healthy cells interact with nearby cancer cells at a molecular level, and how cancer drugs impact these interactions,” he said.
“Perhaps most importantly, we have started to work on a flagship precision medicine project where we will sequence the entire genome of children suffering from rare diseases to precisely diagnose and hopefully treat their respective conditions.”
CLCRF Fellow in Leukaemia Research
Dr Sebastien Malinge
It’s not something you do lightly, move halfway around the world away from family and friends.
But for Sebastien Malinge, of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, it is a necessary step in realising an ambition to further his research into leukaemia. And, it is an opportunity made possible by the Children’s Leukaemia and Cancer Research Foundation (CLCRF), who are providing funding for an initial period of four years.
Sebastien’s CLCRF Fellowship is an important milestone in developing close collaborative linkages between the The Kids Cancer Centre and cancer research institutions in France in order to establish a bank of leukemic cells from patients.
Leukaemias are the most common childhood cancers, and, even if most of the genetic causes are now known, the outcomes for patients still need to be improved.
The bank of leukaemic cells will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, helping them to better understand the genes and pathways that are deregulated in leukemia patients.
It will also allow high throughput drug screening followed by the testing of novel drug candidates directly on cancer cells in animal models.
“This will be an important biological resource to test new hypotheses, develop new experimental strategies, and identify novel drug combinations, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of care and outcomes for a significant subset of children with leukaemia,” Sebastien said.
Already Sebastien and his colleagues at the Gustave Roussy Institute, a leading cancer centre in Europe, along with collaborators in the US, have identified a number of genes on chromosome 21 that promote leukaemia in children with Down syndrome.
He is committed to now expand these findings to other types of childhood leukaemia that also have extra copies of chromosome 21 such as B cell precursor acute lymphoid leukaemia (B-ALL), the most common type of childhood leukaemia.
Northern Star Resources Professor of Children’s Respiratory Health Research
Professor Steve Stick
Advances by researchers in Perth in asthma, cystic fibrosis, respiratory infections and chronic neonatal lung disease have placed Western Australia among the best regions in the world when it comes to children’s respiratory research.
One of Perth’s internationally respected children’s respiratory experts is Professor Steve Stick. As the Northern Star Resources Professor of Children’s Respiratory Health Research, Steve has been charged by the Institute with creating a centre that brings together collaborating researchers from the Perth Children’s Hospital, the Institute, and WA’s universities in order to foster an even greater research synergy focussed on delivering benefits to children with breathing difficulties.
The professorship funded by Northern Star Resources will afford Steve the time and necessary assistance to organise what will eventually be called the Centre for Respiratory Health Research at The Kids.
“This is an exciting initiative that for the first time will formally bring together researchers in asthma, indigenous health, cystic fibrosis, chronic neonatal lung disease, respiratory infections, rare and congenital lung diseases, non-CF bronchiectasis, pollution and lung disease together in one centre,” Steve said.
“Northern Star’s philanthropic commitment is critical to making this centre a reality, and I appreciate Bill Beament’s leadership and vision.” Bill Beament is Executive Chairman of Northern Star Resources.
Angela Wright Bennett Professor of Autism Research
Professor Andrew Whitehouse
Medical research breakthroughs are often years in the making. Unfortunately, the funding so crucial to helping them be realised can be hard to obtain and usually lasts only for short periods of time.
Andrew Whitehouse’s appointment as the Angela Wright Bennett Professor of Autism Research at The Kids Research Institute Australia is a rarity in that it provides stable funding for five years.
“That is an utter dream in our business, it really is,” Professor Whitehouse said.
“If we are going to do research that truly matters, that can truly change healthcare for the better, it is not a 12-month project that does this. It is a program of research that spans several years.”
Professor Whitehouse’s focus is on early identification and the development of early intervention therapies for children with autism.
The Fellowship allows him to be more ambitious and undertake projects over a number of years that have greater potential to change lives.
Research was already starting to unravel the complex causes of autism and this was helping to drive targeted therapies.
“That is tremendously exciting because once you understand the biological mechanism you can start to actually home in on them, target them and help kids develop,” he said.
“It is now reasonably common to get a diagnosis at two years of age. When I started the average age of diagnosis was about five, so we are recognising the signs and symptoms earlier and that means we can start our interventions when the brain is at its most changeable.”
The Kids Kimberley Field Fellowships
with thanks to Chris and Tia Ellison and to Mineral Resources Ltd
The Institute recognises that in Western Australia Aboriginal children are among our most vulnerable children. For several years we have been strengthening our Aboriginal child health research by working in partnership with Aboriginal families and communities to conduct the research they consider to be most relevant to them – research that encompasses their needs and respects their world view.
Strong partnerships with Aboriginal communities require proximity. To manifest our partnership ethos, in 2016 the Institute established a permanent base in the Kimberley. The aim of The Kids Kimberley is to be closer to the children, families and medical services we work with, and to have Kimberley communities view us as a committed, familiar and trustworthy friend.
Recently, these communities identified that the research they would most like to see us undertake is in two critical areas: youth resilience and positive parenting. To address these issues head on, Chris and Tia Ellison along with Mineral Resources Ltd have helped the Institute create two Field Fellowships.
To be recruited to begin work in 2018, the Field Fellows will be based in the The Kids Kimberley office in Broome for a period of three years. Each will conduct research in an immediate and responsive way in order to produce the knowledge required to effect change as rapidly as possible.
Children's research relies on the ongoing support of people just like you. To see how you can directly help improve the lives of kids everywhere, visit Ways to Donate.