Human systems biology centre to be established in Sydney

The Centenary Institute’s cytometry research program, led by Professor Barbara Fazekas de St Groth and Dr Adrian Smith in collaboration with Professor Nicholas King from University of Sydney, last night received the $1 million Ramaciotti Biomedical Research Award. As a result of the award, the organisations will establish the Ramaciotti Centre for Human Systems Biology.

Professor Nicholas King with Dr Adrian Smith and Professor Barbara Fazekas de St Groth. Credit: Kat Finch, Centenary Institute.

Professor King and Dr Smith are the Academic and Technical Directors of the Advanced Cytometry Facility, a joint facility that has been providing access to state-of-the-art cytometry equipment and expertise to a wide range of users since 2006. The Ramaciotti Centre will be modelled on the success of the existing facility.

Professor Fazekas and her colleagues have been investigating how regulatory T-cells regulate our immune system and prevent autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. These regulatory T-cells form complex networks whose functions within the body can be understood by the molecules they express. Existing technology can track up to 15-20 molecules simultaneously.

The centre will buy Australia’s first CyTOF (cytometry by time of flight) mass spectrometer which can track up to 100 different cellular processes simultaneously in a thousand cells each second. It uses rare earth metals (lanthanides) to label biological molecules, overcoming the bandwidth limitations of the current fluorescence-based technology. Professor Fazekas said the technology “will allow us to study millions of individual white blood cells and reveal where they’ve been and who they’ve been talking to”.

The centre will also support a staff of technical experts to develop the analysis techniques that are vital to ensuring the quality of the data and to maximise outcomes through the integration of cytometry data with clinical, genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, kinomic and medical imaging data. Ramaciotti Centres covering many of these technologies have already been established in NSW thanks to previous Biomedical Research Awards.

Professor Fazekas and her colleagues hope for the equipment and expertise of the centre to be freely available to the wider NSW research community. They already have the support of many NSW research organisations, including the University of New South Wales, ANZAC Research Institute, Garvan Institute, Westmead Millennium Institute, Royal Prince Alfred, Concord and Westmead Hospitals, having received proposals to use the centre to explore:

• How individual human melanoma cells change as they migrate away from a tumour;
• How cells become cancerous in response to UV radiation and potential new drugs to treat this;
• The differences between the individual cells in a breast cancer tumour;
• How viruses such as herpes and measles infect nerve cells and the damage that’s caused when our bodies respond.

The centre will also collaborate with an engineering group at Macquarie University to develop new labelling reagents for the CyTOF technology.

The Ramaciotti Centre will be housed in the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and is expected to open in mid-2014.

Source