Three leading researchers from The University of Queensland have been recognised for their health and medical innovation by being named finalists in the 2023 Research Australia Awards.
The awards, now in its 20th year, celebrate excellence across the Australian health and medical research landscape.
The UQ finalists are:
- Professor Michele Sterling – RECOVER Injury Research Centre
- Dr Alysha Elliott and the CO-ADD Team – Institute for Molecular Bioscience
- Professor Jürgen Götz – Queensland Brain Institute
Professor Michele Sterling
from has changed the way whiplash injuries are assessed and treated.
“As a clinical physiotherapist I became frustrated that I couldn’t help some patients to recover who then went on to develop chronic pain – so I embarked on a research career looking at pain in a different way,” Professor Sterling said.
Her early work established the limited benefit of traditional physical treatments.
Professor Sterling then developed risk screening tools, treatments and resources that have been adopted by physiotherapists, doctors and patients worldwide.
The research has also informed national and international policy.
“My goal is to improve treatment for people with whiplash injury primarily by physiotherapists who play the most important role in helping people after their injury,” Professor Sterling said.
“The proportion of people suffering from musculoskeletal pain is growing and it is important they are evaluated effectively at an early stage, so those at risk are given more proactive care.”
Professor Sterling recently received three new Medical Research Future Fund grants to continue her work.
The grant projects will look at preventing chronic pain after whiplash from road traffic injury, run clinical trials to test the safety and effectiveness of a new treatment for chronic neck pain and investigate post-injury psychological and physical care.
Dr Alysha Elliott and the CO-ADD Team
and a team at The University of Queensland’s are trying to find new weapons to fight superbugs, the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria.
It is predicted by 2050 more patients will die from resistant infections than from cancer.
“A huge part of the problem is that we are no longer discovering new antibiotics because almost all large pharmaceutical companies have stopped research in the field,” Dr Elliott said.
In 2015, IMB set up the to crowdsource potential new antibiotics from research groups around the world.
Led by microbiologist Dr Elliott, chemoinformatics expert and medicinal chemist , CO-ADD is trying to revive older antibiotics that are increasingly ineffective by coupling them with non-antibiotic drugs called ‘potentiators’.
“Antibiotic ‘potentiators’ are an exciting approach to extend the lifetime of existing antibiotics and address the urgent crisis of antibiotic resistance,” Dr Elliott said.
“Over the past 8 years we’ve tested more than 320,000 compounds from more than 330 research groups in 49 countries – to our knowledge the most compounds ever tested for antimicrobial activity under standardised conditions released to the public.
“We’ve been fostering collaborative discovery, bringing together national and international researchers to work on the fight against antimicrobial resistance.
“There has been a lot of media coverage about superbugs, but the message often doesn’t get through until it happens to someone you care about and then you realise, for some infections, there really aren’t any treatments left.
“That’s the problem we are trying to fix.”
Professor Jürgen Götz
A Queensland-made medical device aiming to treat Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases using ultrasound technology has the potential to improve millions of lives worldwide.
The UltraThera device, pioneered by The University of Queensland researcher from (QBI), stimulates the brain to improve memory function.
“The UltraThera device has demonstrated early promise through clinical safety trials and once complete, the next steps are to expand the clinical trials and scale up local manufacture of the device in Queensland,” Professor Götz said.
“There is currently no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s, so it is hugely rewarding that we could in the future potentially treat the disease with ultrasound.”
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting 1 in 10 Australians over 65 years of age.
There are an estimated 401,300 people living with dementia in Australia.
Professor Götz said the portable technology promises a low-cost, non-invasive treatment, to address the major global challenge of dementia and other neurological diseases.
“This innovative scanning ultrasound approach may directly treat the disease and also has the potential to improve the delivery of existing Alzheimer’s drugs, massively reducing healthcare costs and delaying the progression of the disease in patients worldwide,” he said.
“Our end goal is to be able to safely pass drugs through the blood-brain barrier, opening the door for new treatments for many conditions affecting the brain, including mental health and brain injury.”
The winners will be announced at an event in Sydney on Thursday 2 November.
