Ageing, heart disease and colour blindness among key themes for 5th AHMRC

The 5th Australian Health and Medical Research Congress wound up in Melbourne today after this week playing host to a coterie of top local and international researchers.

Conference director Dr Rosie Keogh told ALS that the biennial event had been a resounding success this year with over 1500 delegates attending. Around 50 international and 130 local speakers presented across a wide spectrum of disciplines, with the over arching theme of this year's conference being infection and disease

“The primary objective of the event is to promote cross disciplinary interaction,” Keogh said.

In addition to commercial entities and universities, the event also played host to representatives from some 23 participating societies including The Australasian Society for Stem Cell Research, The Human Genetics Society of Australasia and the Molecular and Experimental Pathology Society of Australasia. The principal sponsor was the National Heath and Medical Research Council.

One of the key speakers at this week’s event was ex-pat Australian Professor David Sinclair from the department of pathology at Harvard Medical School.

He told ALS that the conference had given him the opportunity to speak with several high calibre researchers from around the world, while laying the foundations for a number of new collaborations with Australian researchers and institutions.

“I discussed a number of collaborations with Australian researchers,” he said, adding “it’s great to see how Australian science is up with the best”.

One of the world’s foremost experts on ageing, Sinclair is working on enzymes that might one day form the basis of new categories of drugs which address multiple health issues which tend to appear in old age.

In Australia for just the second time, professor Jay Neitz from the University of Washington was another of the major speakers. One of the world's foremost experts on sight related disorders, Neitz is close to a major breakthrough in the treatment of colour blindness. He presented a paper to delegates based on a primate model in which he shows that correcting a mutant red photopigment gene to restore colour vision.

More importantly he has been able to show that mutations in colour genes are also often associated with actual blindness, including age-relatd macular regeneration.

Dr Rod Dilley, Principal Scientist at The Australian Tissue Engineering Centre and leader of Cardiac Tissue Engineering Group at the O'Brien Institute, said that this year’s event provided valuable opportunities to showcase his team’s work while also observing the latest developments across all key disciplines.

Dilley and his team have been working on ways to guarantee blood supply to implanted heart cells, applications of which could have major implications for the future treatment of heart disease.

“You can put together and assemble piece of tissue, but the problem is there’s no blood supply,” he explained.

“We have a model where we put inside a small plastic chamber under skin to put blood supply through.”

It acts in many ways as a kind of biological scaffolding.

“We have opened the door for novel new approaches for regenerative cardio-vascular medicine,” Dilley said.

“In terms of tissue engineering in vivo we believe we’re ahead of most people in the world”.

Dilley added that he especially welcomed the opportunity to converse with eminent Harvard cardiovascular expert Dr Kenneth Chien, also in Melbourne this week for the conference.

Chien and his team have been working to develop techniques for growing new hearts, or pieces of heart, from stem cells, an area where Dilley sees attractive partnership opportunities, although he didn’t elaborate on whether he and Chien had engaged in any formal discussions.

But it’s early days.

The work of Chien’s and Dilley’s sits at the largely unexplored intersection of tissue engineering and stem cell technology, which many believe will be a key source of important advances in the treatment of cardiovascular and other diseases in the future.