Sonya Fenton, a BBioMedSci(Hons) student in the Kemp lab has been awarded the Barbara Heslop Memorial Scholarship, valued at $8,500. This scholarship is in memory of the late professor Barabara Heslop who graduated from Otago Medical School in 1948 and had a forty-year career at Otago, specializing in transplantation research.
After getting an overseas laboratory test for Covid-19 working in New Zealand - with Associate Professor James Ussher - Quiñones-Mateu was in the lab for much of lockdown. He, Postdoctoral Fellow Rhodri Harfoot and a small team grew the virus from patient samples, turning a healthy carpet of cells in a flask discoloured and patchy. They isolated and sequenced the RNA - genetic code - and became the only lab in the country to have the virus.
An Assistant Research Fellow at the University of Otago’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Tom (23) has won this year’s Gordon Watson Scholarship. The award is worth $24,000 and will allow him to spend two years at Columbia, beginning this September, to complete a Masters of Public Health.
A collaboration between Otago and ESR has received a substantial government grant to lead an international team of scientists to sequence the genomes of all of New Zealand’s positive COVID-19 cases and track how the virus spread across New Zealand. Dr Jemma Geoghegan has been allocated $600,000 from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) COVID-19 Innovation Acceleration Fund.
Another reason for the phantastic Lucía Malone (Fineran Lab) to be smiling. Her PhD thesis has been put on the Health Sciences Divisional List of Exceptional Theses. Lucía Malone, a PhD candidate in the Fineran Lab, recently handed in her PhD thesis titled, "Phage interactions with CRISPR-Cas systems in Serratia sp. ATCC 39006. Congratulations Lucía! We are very proud.
Associate Professor Jo Kirman co-wrote Otago's most read article in the last year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced it will donate A$10 million to help fund an Australian trial testing whether a very old vaccine, BCG, can be used against a new threat, COVID-19. So what is the BCG vaccine and what might its place be in the fight against coronavirus?
E whakahīhī nei mātou ki a koe! Department of Microbiology and Immunology Researchers have received HRC explorer Grants. Professor Alex McLellan has received a $150,000 HRC Explorer Grant: "Fighting splicing with splicing: New strategies for CAR T cell immunotherapy". Dr Lyn Wise and Associate Professor Roslyn Kemp have received a $150,000 HRC Explorer Grant: "Resurrection of an anti-inflammatory therapy through protein engineering".
Every country in the world needs to treat #COVID19 as a national security issue, and allocate a budget for virus research and development that is similar to a defence budget"Check out this fantastic science communication piece by Dr Matloob Husain from the Department, where he emphasizes the need for preparedness around potential virus spillover from animals.
Associate Professor Joanna Kirman, an immunologist, speaks to media about the feasibility of vaccine development. Dr Kirman, an expert on vaccines, has been involved in the development of the rotavirus vaccine and her own speciality is the BCG vaccine. Here she gives her professional opinion and answers questions about timelines, upscaling, clinical trials and efficacy of a potential coronavirus vaccine and what is means for the ongoing pandemic.
Professor Miguel Quiñones-Mateu speaks to 1 NEWS about the race to find a vaccine for COVID-19. "We cannot sit on the sideline. We cannot wait for everybody else to do the job. We have to do it ourselves. Once we know we have a winner, just forget about the other ones and go for that one,” says Dr Quiñones-Mateu.
