Professors Frank Carbone and Mark Smyth are leaders in the fields of chronic infectious diseases and cancer research respectively. They are two of nine recipients of the national awards which recognise Australia’s best and brightest in medical research.

Professor Peter Rathjen Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) says, “the University of Melbourne is delighted that the outstanding research of Professors Carbone and Smyth has been recognised by the award of Australia Fellowships from the NHMRC.

“Their work, in infectious disease and cancer, tackles important issues for human health, and has been prioritised for expansion via construction of the $203m Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and the $1.07bn Parkville Comprehensive Cancer Centre within the Parkville precinct.”

Professor Frank Carbone of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences and his team are trying to understand how chronic infection enters and spreads around the body.
 
“Understanding how to control and stop chronic infectious diseases such as TB, HIV and STDs such as herpes is an enormous challenge,” he says.

 “As scientists what we hope to do is harness the immune system to directly stop or at least control these infections.” 

Using herpes as a model for chronic infection Professor Carbone and his team found a way to get the immune system to stop the infection in a highly focused and very efficient manner. Using this discovery they now want to apply this localised immunity to other chronic infections.

“We believe that infection needs to be managed at points of entry for these microbes, such as skin, lung and gut, and that we can exploit our approach in construction of more effective vaccines,” he says.

“This award will greatly assist us to better understand how chronic infections can be controlled.”

Professor Mark Smyth is from the University’s Departments of Pathology and of Microbiology and Immunology and is Co-Head of the Cancer Immunology Program and Head of the Cellular Immunity Lab at the Peter McCallum Cancer Centre. He is investigating the body’s immune response to cancer to discover at what point the immune system gets engaged in fighting the disease.

He says that an ideal clinical outcome from this immunology research would be that the immune system of each patient controls and rejects cancer cells at a tumour’s emerging stages, without harming the body.

“These are the approaches we’re taking: we boost the immune system, so that it can drive only the elements of the system that you want, to get a rejection response, but also to try and block the tumour’s mechanisms which suppress the immune system.’

“This grant is welcome support for the development of new cancer therapies to make a difference to patients.”