Monash's Rossjohn wins Life Scientist of the Year

Monash University researcher Jamie Rossjohn has been awarded the AUD$50,000 2004 Science Minister's Prize for Life Scientist of the Year for his work on protein structure and crystallography.

Rossjohn, who has been at Monash since moving from St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research in 2001, said he was overwhelmed to be awarded the prize, which is presented annually to a researcher 35 years or younger.

"Although it's a personal award, I feel it's recognition for the whole team," Rossjohn said.

Rossjohn is a leader in protein crystallography in Australia, with 50 papers and several patents under his belt. He heads the protein crystallography unit in Monash University's department of biochemistry.

Earlier this year, Rossjohn and his collaborators at the University of Melbourne led by Jim McCluskey published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the structure and interactions of immunosuppressant drug OKT3, a therapeutic monoclonal antibody used in transplantation patients to prevent rejection, with its target, part of the T cell receptor complex. He said the results, which provided a detailed structure of the interaction between OKT3 and its receptor, showed a relatively low affinity between the antibody and its target, which could have implications for the drug, which has been used clinically for nearly 20 years, and future drug design.

Rossjohn has also recently been awarded a $3.6 million ARC linkage grant to work with Melbourne biotech company Cytopia on designing inhibitors to the JAK family of kinases as potential drugs for immune diseases, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Other collaborations include one with Monash's Ben Adler and the ARC Centre in Microbial Genomics on Mycobacterium proteins. Rossjohn said it has not been difficult to form collaborations with other researchers at Monash.

"I came to Monash because I saw it as a great untapped opportunity -- there were great scientists but structural biology was not high on the agenda," he said. "It's just been a matter of exposing scientists to protein structural biology -- showing them that it's not too hard."

As one of Australia's so-called 'suitcase scientists' Rossjohn visits the synchrotron facility in Chicago two or three times a year, and is looking forward to having one next door. But despite the travel, which is followed by intensive round the clock experiments to maximise the use of the synchrotron, and the logistical problems of getting delicate crystals to the other side of the world, he says he enjoys being able to get back to the experimental side of science.

"I always go to the synchrotron -- I'm an experimentalist at heart and structural biology gives me the opportunity to be hands on ... not just behind a desk," he said.

But the long waiting time between experiments is frustrating, Rossjohn said, especially when competitors overseas have more frequent access to synchrotron time, and can easily wipe out the competitive edge built up by the Australian researchers.

Rossjohn's current challenge is to develop high throughput crystallography at Monash. The unit has recently installed a robot for performing crystallisation and is looking at robots for protein expression and purification processes.

In the meantime, Rossjohn said he has no plans to sit back and rest on his laurels.

"We have so much unpublished that the best is yet to come," he said.