Major prize for waxing lyrical
March 2007PhD student Joanne Slater in the Division of Medicine and Surgery has won the prestigious Thomas J Walsh award for 'best presentation' at the international Focus on Fungal Infections conference in San Diego.
The prize is in recognition of a new approach to pre-clinical experimentation, which Joanne and supervisors Dr Peter Warn and Professor David Denning have developed as an alternative to tests on animals or - at the other end of the scale - fruit flies.
Injecting wax moth caterpillars with fungal infections like Aspergillus fumigatus, which is one of the commonest causes of death in leukaemia and bone marrow transplant patients and difficult to investigate via clinical trials, allows researchers to test the safety and efficacy of anti-fungal drugs; and the team believes the approach could be extended to other diseases including MRSA.
"These caterpillars have a very similar genetic make-up and set of responses to humans, making their use in pre-clinical experimentation very valid," Dr Warn said. "It facilitates extremely large-scale testing, avoids potential ethical issues around animal testing, and provides far more useful data than the current alternative of testing drugs in test tubes."
The meeting is one of the most competitive forums on new clinical practice in fungal disease, and the $15 000 prize has traditionally been awarded to large clinical trials. The award will allow the team to continue to develop the approach over the coming months, and investigate possible commercialisation routes.
