Colman wins Victoria Prize

Professor Peter Colman, head of structural biology at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, has won the $50,000 Victoria Prize for science.

The award, one of Australia's richest, was presented to Colman at a ceremony in Melbourne this afternoon.

Colman was awarded for his pioneering work in uncovering the structure of neuraminidase, which he worked on while at CSIRO with Dr Graeme Laver and Dr Jose Varghese, leading to the development of the neuraminidase inhibitor zanamivir, marketed under the brand name Relenza. Another neuraminidase inhibitor, Tamiflu, is also on the market.

Colman now concentrates on the Bcl-2 family of proteins, which mediates the apoptosis pathway. He is studying how viruses express proteins to block the pathway by mimicking Bcl-2, particularly how the M11L protein in the poxvirus Myxoma works as an anti-apoptotic.

Colman originally started out as a physicist before moving into x-ray crystallography. In the late 1970s, when Laver was able to produce crystals of neuraminidase - also known as sialidase, an enzyme found on the surface of the influenza virus - Colman and Varghese used x-ray diffraction to image the structure.

Neuraminidase assists viruses in releasing their virions from the infected cell. Research on inhibiting neuraminidase was led by Professor Mark von Itzstein and his team at Monash University's Victorian College of Pharmacy, supported by biotech company Biota, which now licenses Relenza to GSK. Biota is currently developing long-acting neuraminidase inhibitors.

Colman was a founding director of Biota and also a founder of Starpharma, from which he has recently retired.

Previous winners of the Victoria Prize include Professor Colin Masters (2007), Professor Keith Nugent (2004), Professor David Vaux (2003), Professor Donald Metcalf (2000), and Professor Graeme Clark (1999).

The prize is complemented by the $100,000 Anne and Eric Smorgon Memorial Award, which is given to an institute supporting the prize recipient.

WEHI's Dr Ian Majewski also won a 2008 Victoria Fellowship, an $18,000 travel grant, to investigate next generation gene sequencing.