Boundary-pushing research is set to deliver new insights and improved health outcomes on a global scale after outstanding researchers receive big NHMRC grants.

A raft of leading projects have secured funding totalling more than $12.3 million under the latest National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator ($9M) and Big Ideas ($3.3M) grant rounds.

Securing prestigious Investigator Grants are Professors Tracey Wade, Justine Smith, Jamie Craig and Dr Bastien Lechat and their teams.

The funding recognises the outstanding contributions they are making in their fields. The high impact solutions for real-world health challenges they are driving will transform lives and deliver stronger, healthier communities into the future.

The NHMRC Investigator Grants have been awarded to:

• Revolutionising early intervention outcomes for youth with emerging eating disorders ($2,953,040) led by Professor Tracey Wade, Director of Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
• Addressing the Greatest Unmet Needs in Uveitis ($2,953,040), led by Professor Justine Smith, Strategic Professor in Eye & Vision Health, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor, College of Medicine and Public Health
• Expanding the indications for polygenic risk testing in glaucoma ($2,476,520), led by Professor Jamie Craig, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor, College of Medicine and Public Health
• Redefining sleep disordered breathing diagnostics and management: A novel data-driven digital health approach ($662,040) led by Dr Bastien Lechat, Research Fellow, College of Medicine and Public Health

These large grants recognise the outstanding quality, creativity and impact of these projects and enable the researchers’ transformative work to spearhead into new research directions and on a global scale.

___

Professor Tracey Wade, Director of Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work

NHMRC Investigator Grant: $2,953,040.00

Project: Revolutionising early intervention outcomes for youth with emerging eating disorders

Overview: “Barriers exist in recognising eating disorders are a common mental illness. This has created a gap between timely treatment and the provision of effective treatments for eating disorders. This project will identify, with a variety of stakeholders, the critical issues that cause eating disorders to develop. We will then develop and test a range of brief interventions that have the most promising health outcomes for young people aged up to 25 years with emerging eating disorders. It will reduce the need for more intensive and expensive interventions later. This work meets a critical need in the community where the prevalence of eating disorders in young people has increased 15% since COVID, resulting in a three-fold increase in demand for eating disorder treatment.”

Professor Justine Smith, Strategic Professor in Eye and Vision Health, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor, College of Medicine and Public Health.

NHMRC Investigator Grant: $2,953,040.00

Project: Addressing the Greatest Unmet Needs in Uveitis

Overview: Overview: “Uveitis is an inflammatory disease involving tissues inside the eye. Uveitis affects working-age adults, can cause rapid vision loss in 70% of patients and it is the cause of up to 25% of blindness around the world today. This project will develop, implement and evaluate new therapeutic approaches including drug targets and AI, to reverse or prevent uveitis-related vision loss.  The research is expected to deliver superior management options for clinicians, new training opportunities for the next generation of clinician-scientists, and higher quality of life outcomes for patients.”

Professor Jamie Craig, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor, College of Medicine and Public Health

NHMRC Investigator Grant: $2,476,520.00

Project: Expanding the indications for polygenic risk testing in glaucoma

Overview: “Glaucoma is one of the most heritable diseases – affecting 3% of people over 50 years worldwide today. Asymptomatic in its early stages, it is the leading cause of irreversible blindness if left untreated, with approximately half of those with it being undiagnosed. Our research will use a risk prediction model in depth genetic understanding to help advance new screening, leading to earlier intervention and improved treatment options available to clinicians, and a better outlook for patients. The research outcomes extend to widening critical knowledge in glaucoma genetics so all high-risk individuals are diagnosed early in the disease and that means preventing the loss of vision.”

Dr Bastien Lechat, College of Medicine and Public Health Research Fellow

NHMRC Investigator Grant: $662,040.00

Project: Redefining sleep disordered breathing diagnostics and management: A novel data-driven digital health approach

Overview: “Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is a chronic respiratory disorder where breathing is repeatedly reduced or stops completely during sleep. It is estimated to affect over 1 billion people globally with considerable negative impacts if left untreated. My aim is to create a new model of care for sleep disordered breathing that will provide accurate, inexpensive, and scalable diagnostic and treatment options for sleep disordered breathing. This includes use of simplified, at-home and cost-effective technologies to build the bedroom of the future – a multi-modal, multi-night approach to sleep disordered breathing diagnosis and ongoing monitoring. This will help accurately diagnose millions of people that would have otherwise been missed or over diagnosed, reduce costs and be accessible to those in rural and lower socio-economic areas with reduced access to sleep clinics.”

___________

Big Ideas get grant boost

A personalised body-clock tracker, treatments for adolescent disordered eating, halting dengue fever in its tracks and unlocking the nexus between memory loss and dementia have been awarded NHMRC Ideas Grants.

The researchers have been awarded more than $3.3 million in Ideas grants to develop improved healthcare solutions – further recognition of the university’s impressive research performance growth, with the researchers accelerating their important work.

Ideas Grants have been awarded for:

Personalised daily body-clock tracking and circadian light therapy retiming to improve sleep, performance, health and safety ($1,335,760.35)

Lead researcher: Professor Peter Catcheside, College of Medicine and Public Health.

Professor Catcheside says: “We want to solve one of the biggest ongoing problems in sleep medicine by devising a practical way to reliably track and treat people with a body-clock timing problem. We will use a range of technology, including heart rate, skin and core body temperature and motion monitors, in combination with physiology and engineering analysis methods, to track the daily core body temperature minimum time. This is a key marker of when the body-clock is most sensitive to re-timing effects of blue-enriched light.”

Targeting outcomes of adolescent disordered eating: identifying and integrating novel molecular and biopsychosocial risk models ($624,126.00)

Lead researcher, Associate Professor Sarah Cohen-Woods, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work.

Associate Professor Sarah Cohen-Woods says: “About 15% of Australian girls experience an eating disorder by age 19. Impacting so many teens, it is critical to improve the detection, progression, and the health impacts of disordered eating.  This pivotal work will identify biological, psychological, and social factors that collectively influence disordered eating, and how teenage disordered eating can lead to poor physical and mental health outcomes in early adulthood. Through this we will be able to better inform treatment and crucially early intervention in the future.”

Understanding and exploiting the mechanism of action of a novel dengue virus inhibitor ($755,276.00)

Lead researcher, Dr Nicholas Eyre, College of Medicine and Public Health.

Dr Nicholas Eyre says: “There is an urgent need for safe and effective therapies to treat dengue virus (DENV) infection. Potent and safe inhibitors that target the viral NS4B protein have recently been developed and are in advanced stages of clinical development. This project will employ advanced proteomics, molecular virology, high resolution microscopy and molecular modelling approaches to reveal new details about the precise effects of these inhibitors and mechanisms of viral resistance.”

A phosphorylation signature controls memory traces ($590,547.40)

Lead researcher Dr Kristie Stefanoska, College of Medicine and Public Health.

Dr Kristie Stefanoska says: “Alzheimer’s disease is characterised by prominent memory loss. To improve treatments, a better understanding of the molecular basis of memory is required. This project will communicate a new understanding of memory based on a key Alzheimer’s factor – the tau protein. Using a series of innovative approaches in memory-containing brain cells, the results will provide a compelling answer for how tau and memory are physiologically connected. The work will serve as a prime paradigm to study how individual memories are created and maintained and help explain memory loss in tau-related dementia.”