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Victoria Fellowships for two Monash researchers

17 August 2005

A researcher who aims to discover why the body sometimes rejects organ transplants and a microbiologist who hopes to unlock the mystery of Legionnaires' disease have been awarded Victoria Fellowships.

The Victorian Government established the fellowships, worth $18,000 each, eight years ago to recognise young researchers with leadership potential who were developing ideas that could be of commercial benefit to Victoria.

One of the recipients, Dr Whitney Macdonald (pictured right), 29, from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, said although Australia had one of the highest transplant success rates in the world, many problems still existed.

"Although we have come a long way in managing the problem of organ rejection, there is still room for improvement," Dr Macdonald said.

She is leading a project investigating the way in which a recipient's T-cells (immune system cells that fight infection) recognise donor cells as foreign in transplant rejection. The work is a collaboration between laboratories at Monash, headed by Dr Jamie Rossjohn, and the University of Melbourne, led by Professor James McCluskey.

Dr Macdonald will use her fellowship to travel to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Colorado, in the US, to learn a new way of identifying proteins on the surface of a cell to which an immune response has been directed.

The other recipient, postgraduate student Ms Hayley Newton (pictured left) from the Department of Microbiology, is researching how the bacterium Legionella pneumophila infects people and causes Legionnaires' disease, a rare form of pneumonia. Ms Newton is completing her PhD studies in the laboratory of Dr Elizabeth Hartland.

"My ultimate aim is to understand the mechanism of this disease, potentially leading to the development of new treatment and prevention strategies," she said. "In a way, my research is like detective work -- we look for clues to how the bacteria infiltrate the host, and with that knowledge we can find new ways to treat the disease."

Ms Newton, 25, will travel to Northwestern University, Chicago, in the US, in October, to concentrate on studying three genes that appear to enable the bacterium to infect human cells.