2019 Grant Recipients

The 2019 Dean's Innovation Grant first prize was awarded to Dr Linda Wakim for ‘A novel universal influenza virus vaccine that provides long term protection’. The second prize was awarded to Dr Glen Carter for ‘Novel antimicrobials for the treatment of multidrug resistant priority pathogens’. An honourable mention went to Dr Marios Koutsakos for ‘Developing a universal influenza B vaccine’.

“It is difficult to attract external funding for early stage product development”, says Dr Wakim. “This award provides us a way forward, a means to move our product to the next phase of development by allowing us to perform key proof-of-concept experiments.”

Dr Carter was delighted with the outcome, saying that “It’s a great forum to get your research heard by a lot of senior people within the Faculty. And you never know, you might end up winning”.

Each finalist for the award was commended for their proposed solutions to real-world problems:

• Dr Annabell Bachem for ‘Does the microbiota-derived metabolite butyrate improve adoptive T cell therapy?’
• Dr Claudia Di Bella for ‘3D-OSTEO: biofabrication of a 3D ex-vivo organoid model of osteosarcoma’
• Dr Chris French for ‘Making better pain, heart and epilepsy drugs’; and
• Dr Eric Ji-Hoon Joo for ‘Our gut microbiome explains high epi-mutational rates in colorectal cancer’.

Dr Koutsakos, who received an honorable mention, recommends entering this award to other mid-career researchers, saying “Participating in this award and pitching the project makes you think about the science from the perspective of translation and commercialisation, which we don’t always do. It was a great learning experience!”