Kolling director wins Ramaciotti medal

Prof Rob Baxter, Director of the Kolling Institute of Medical Research at the Royal North Shore Hospital and head of the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Sydney, has been awarded the 2002 Ramaciotti medal and $20,000 for his research on insulin-like growth factors and their binding proteins.

Baxter's work in the area of metabolic regulation began in the Department of Endocrinology at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney where he began research on the 'somatomedins', now renamed insulin-like growth factors, IGF-I and IGF-II. Insulin-like growth factors regulate normal cell growth and metabolism throughout the body, and are also important in stimulating the growth of cancer cells.

Baxter's laboratory made some fundamental contributions to the discovery that the actions of IGFs are controlled by a group of six IGF binding proteins, one of which has become his "favourite protein" -- IGF binding protein 3. His lab also developed new methods of measuring these proteins and these methods are now used in labs around the world.

Baxter took the director's chair at the Kolling in 1994, where his laboratory continued to work on the IGFs and their binding proteins. This work shed new light on how IGFs circulate in the bloodstream and are delivered to tissues. The work has broad implications in human physiology and pathology since understanding how these factors are delivered to tissues is relevant to a number disease states in which normal tissue and body growth is impaired, such as diabetes and renal failure.

Some of these studies were integral to the development of laboratory tests now used routinely to diagnose growth disorders, assist in the identification of some cancers and for use in detecting growth hormone abuse by athletes.

Another part of Baxter's work involved the discovery that IGF binding proteins modulate IGF actions on cells and may even have independent effects on cell growth. These binding proteins can affect a wide range of cell processes, they can even act inside the cell nucleus, and can prevent cancer cell growth. This area of work is important in understanding the cellular growth abnormalities in cancer and has implications for cancer therapy.

Selected from nine nominated applicants, Baxter is the eighth annual recipient of the Ramaciotti medal, which recognises excellence in medical research in Australia..

Dr Susan Williamson is editor of Today's Life Science