She was part of an internationally renowned and world-leading group focused on research into protein abnormalities and disease.Īt the closing stages of her PhD, Dr Meehan was awarded a prestigious 18-month International Fellowship from the Royal Society to undertake research at the University of Adelaide with Professor John Carver.ĭr Ecroyd completed his PhD at Newcastle University and then spent two years in France, undertaking a post doctorate at INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, where he worked on the protein responsible for Mad Cow Disease.ĭr Ecroyd joined Professor Carver's research as a National Health and Medical Research Council Peter Doherty Fellow in 2005. There is rapid progress being made in this field and it will have huge implications for the UK and Australia because of the ageing population."ĭr Meehan completed her degree in Chemistry (MChem) at the University of Oxford in 2000 and transferred to Cambridge University to begin her PhD. "This is a really exciting area of research. Human misfolding diseases result from the failure of proteins to reach their active state or from the accumulation of aberrantly folded proteins. If we can understand this natural defence mechanism better, it will aid in the development of treatments and cures for these age-related diseases."ĭr Ecroyd says the aim of the research is to delay the onset of age-related diseases in the future. Second, the demonstration that prions are responsible for mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), which has infected large numbers of cattle in Great Britain and panicked the public. "Our objective is to investigate how this protective chaperone machinery operates and determine how it can revitalise cells. "As a defence strategy, cells produce chaperone proteins which prevent them from forming abnormal or 'amyloid' deposits. This can be potentially lethal and is linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases," Dr Meehan says. The United Kingdom was afflicted with an outbreak of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as 'mad cow disease'), and its human equivalent variant CreutzfeldtJakob disease (vCJD), in the 1980s and 1990s. "As people age, proteins in their body become unstable and clump together to form abnormal deposits. The pair will conduct X-ray solution scattering experiments at the synchrotron radiation facility at the Daresbury Laboratory in England to determine how the body's natural defence mechanisms can help fight debilitating age-related diseases. Two leading University of Adelaide post-doctoral researchers will visit the UK later this year to get a better insight into age-related diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and cataracts.ĭr Sarah Meehan and Dr Heath Ecroyd from the School of Chemistry and Physics are recipients of the Qantas Research Travel Support Scholarship, a collaborative scheme being pioneered by the University and Qantas to support international researchers.
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