Dr Jade Murray, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University
VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA
Bench Side Story continues with a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, AUSTRALIA.
Dr. Jade M. Murray completed a PhD programme at the Monash University Sleep and Circadian Medicine Laboratory in 2018. Dr. Murray’s broad research interests include studying the effects of circadian misalignment on overall health in both healthy and sleep disordered populations and developing simplified methods for determining the timing of circadian phase. An important innovation in her work has been tracking light-dark exposure data over time to build predictive models of circadian timing for development of personalised delivery systems for sleep-wake interventions to improve health and lifestyle outcomes.
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Targeting chemotherapy resistance in ovarian cancer patients
Dr Alex Cole, from the Centenary Institute’s Centre for Biomedical AI, is now leading the research focused on developing a new treatment to counteract a protein called follistatin (FST), known for making ovarian cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy.
By employing cutting-edge molecular biology and directed evolution techniques, the project aims to create nanobodies—small, precise molecules—that can block FST. If successful, these nanobodies could enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy and improve ovarian cancer treatment rates.
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Computer science approach to detecting dementia
Watch Xinyi Wang, a researcher at the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre, University of Tasmania talk on identifying new approaches to detecting dementia.
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Infections and other lung diseases using models of human lung tissue grown from stem cells
Dr Rhiannon Werder is a Team Leader at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute leading a multidisciplinary team, combining expertise in stem cell biology and immunology, to develop new therapies for lung diseases. Her research centres around induced pluripotent stem cells to investigate respiratory diseases, spanning acute respiratory infections to chronic lung diseases. Using stem cells, Dr Werder’s team creates models of human lung tissue. With these models, Dr Werder is investigating how human-specific pathogens infect different regions of the lung, the ensuing immune responses, and how the lung repairs itself after infections, especially in people with preexisting lung diseases.
