Alliance partners receive $10m in latest NHMRC funding round

Member organisations from the Alfred Research Alliance have received a total of more than $10 million in the latest round of National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funding, announced last week.

The funding covers 10 different projects in the Ideas Grant scheme, which aims to support innovative research projects addressing a specific question. This round was a particularly challenging one, with a national success rate of just 9.5%.

The total amount received by the Alliance member organisations came to $10,341,591. The grants cover a range of areas including brain injury, diabetic kidney disease, epilepsy, heart failure and HIV. Five of the successful grants are in basic science, four in clinical medicine and science, and one in health services research, reflecting the diverse expertise across the precinct.

The successful applications included:

Monash University

A/Prof Sandy Shultz – “Brain injury in intimate partner violence: Insight into a silent pandemic” – $1,924,134

Prof Harshal Nandurkar – “A novel single treatment for two serious complications of allogeneic stem cell transplantation: acute graft-versus-host disease and sinusoidal obstruction syndrome” – $1,863,376

Dr Zhonglin Chai – “New strategy to safely and effectively reduce diabetic kidney disease” – $1,162,198

Dr Sih Min Tan – “Investigating complement C5a receptor 2 as a therapeutic target for diabetic kidney disease” – $855,470

Dr Mastura Monif – “Glioblastoma – inhibition of P2X7R as a potential therapeutic target for treatment of this aggressive cancer” – $842,094

Prof Patrick Kwan – “Machine learning models for personalised epilepsy management” – $781,018

A/Prof Zanfina Ademi – “A novel approach integrating genomics into the health economic modelling of therapeutics” – $491,778

Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute

A/Prof Brian Drew – “Polygenic mitochondrial dysfunction in heart failure and neurodegeneration” – $1,166,807

Dr Guillaume Méric – “Understanding the asymptomatic carriage of pathogens and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the human gut microbiota” – $546,216

Burnet Institute

Dr Anna Hearps – “Eliminating HIV-infected macrophages; a neglected problem in HIV cure research” – $708,501

Congratulations to all of the successful applicants from across the precinct, and commiserations to those who missed out in this tough round.