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Research

Pat Deborah Holt Strickland PhD, DSc, FRCPath, FRCPI, FAA PhD Emeritus Honorary Researcher Head, Pregnancy and Early Life Immunology Patrick.Holt@

Research

The evolutionary acquisition of mitochondria has given rise to the diversity of eukaryotic life. Mitochondria have retained their ancestral α-proteobacterial traits through the maintenance of double membranes and their own circular genome. Their genome varies in size from very large in plants to the smallest in animals and their parasites. The mitochondrial genome encodes essential genes for protein synthesis and has to coordinate its expression with the nuclear genome from which it sources most of the proteins required for mitochondrial biogenesis and function.

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Currently, there are few robustly evaluated social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) measures available for use with Aboriginal youth in research, policy, and practice.

Research

Food Sensations for Adults, funded by the Western Australian Department of Health, is a four-week nutrition education program focused on food literacy, with demonstrated success amongst Western Australians. In the last two years, 25% of programs have been in regional and remote areas and therefore the aim of this research is to explore the impact of the program in regional areas.

Research

Vigilant Attention (VA) is a critical cognitive function allowing to maintain our attention, particularly in redundant or intellectually unchallenging situations. Evidence has shown that, as the brain develops, VA abilities rapidly improve throughout childhood and adolescence.

Research

Differential cell counts is a challenging task when applying computer vision algorithms to pathology. Existing approaches to train cell recognition require high availability of multi-class segmentation and/or bounding box annotations and suffer in performance when objects are tightly clustered.

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Malaria elimination is the goal for Bioko Island, Equatorial Guinea. Intensive interventions implemented since 2004 have reduced prevalence, but progress has stalled in recent years. A challenge for elimination has been malaria infections in residents acquired during travel to mainland Equatorial Guinea.

Research

Benzathine penicillin G (BPG) is used as first-line treatment for most forms of syphilis and as secondary prophylaxis against rheumatic heart disease (RHD). Perceptions that poor quality of BPG is linked to reported adverse effects and therapeutic failure may impact syphilis and RHD control programs. Clinical networks and web-based advertising were used to obtain vials of BPG from a wide range of countries.

Research

Combination vaccines containing whole-cell pertussis antigens were phased out from the Australian national immunisation programme between 1997 and 1999 and replaced by the less reactogenic acellular pertussis (aP) antigens. In a large case-control study of Australian children born during the transition period, those with allergist diagnosed IgE-mediated food allergy were less likely to have received whole-cell vaccine in early infancy than matched population controls (OR: 0.77 (95% CI, 0.62 to 0.95)). We hypothesise that a single dose of whole-cell vaccine in early infancy is protective against IgE-mediated food allergy.

Research

We recently reported that offspring of mice treated during pregnancy with the microbial-derived immunomodulator OM-85 manifest striking resistance to allergic airways inflammation, and localized the potential treatment target to fetal conventional dendritic cell (cDC) progenitors. Here, we profile maternal OM-85 treatment-associated transcriptomic signatures in fetal bone marrow, and identify a series of immunometabolic pathways which provide essential metabolites for accelerated myelopoiesis.