UNSW researchers receive international recognition

November has been a good month for the University of New South Wales, with UNSW researchers receiving recognition on both local and international stages.

Team Injectimod

A group of UNSW students based at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, dubbed ‘Team Injectimod’, has just returned from representing Australia at Harvard University’s BIOMOD championships. The students were placed in the Gold category for their research to rebuild bacteria to use in vaccines against some of the world’s most prevalent diseases.

The team spent four months working to artificially construct the ‘tip’ of bacteria’s molecular syringe, the ‘Type III Secretion System’ (T3SS). The T3SS injects proteins into cells to help bacteria evade the immune system and cause infections resulting in conditions such as diarrhoea and typhoid fever.

As the tip is one of the only parts of the molecular syringe exposed to our immune system, it is an attractive target for the development of new vaccines against bacterial infections. Artificially building the tip is an innovative approach to vaccine design which may prove to be an effective way to achieve new antibacterial vaccines.

“We managed to rebuild part of the needle tip on a tiny scaffold made from DNA and also determined the structures of the needle tip proteins in solution, which has never been done before,” said UNSW student Siddharth Doshi.

A top innovator under 35

UNSW engineer Dr Majid Ebrahimi Warkiani has been named one of the top innovators aged under 35 in the Asia-Pacific by MIT Technology Review. Dr Warkiani and his team have been researching microfluidics, which involves the engineered manipulation of fluids at the microscale, to enable the sorting and separating of rare cells. The technology has shown promise in point-of-care diagnostics and clinical research.

The team’s miniaturised cell separation systems, known as inertial microfluidic platforms, use the force produced by fluids in motion to separate the human body’s rarest cells. The systems are already being used to separate circulating tumour cells (CTCs) from blood to enable them to undergo genetic analysis for advanced cancer management; to enrich malaria parasites from blood for early malaria diagnosis; and to separate stem cells to better understand their therapeutic potential.

The top innovators under 35 will be formally recognised at the 2016 EmTech Asia conference. The group are also in the running to become finalists for the global list of innovators under 35.

Science academy awardees

Three UNSW researchers were recognised this week in the Australian Academy of Science’s honorific awards for 2016.

The 2016 Ian Wark Medal and Lecture was awarded to Scientia Professor Martin Green AM FAA FRS FTSE. Known as the ‘father of photovoltaics’, Professor Green is a world leader in the field. Several generations of his group’s technology have been successfully commercialised and he has helped develop some of the most efficient silicon solar cells in the world.

The 2016 Dorothy Hill Award was meanwhile won by Dr Andréa Taschetto, a leader in climate systems science. Her research has significantly advanced our understanding of the role of the Pacific and Indian Oceans in regional climate variability.

Finally, the 2016 Le Févre Memorial Prize was awarded to Associate Professor Cyrille Boyer, an authority in the field of polymer science, developing innovative methods of polymerisation. His demonstration of how chlorophyll and light can control polymerisation of functional macromolecules has implications for the synthesis of macromolecules using bioresources.