For the first time in Australia, researchers can accurately predict if babies are at risk of childhood obesity by the age of eight to nine years of age.

Researchers from The University of Queensland have developed and validated the i-PATHWAY model, which uses simple risk factors mostly gathered during routine doctor visits at 12 months of age to predict future childhood obesity.

Dr Oliver Canfell, Research Fellow and dietitian with the UQ Centre for Health Services Research said i-PATHWAY could calculate the risk of childhood obesity with 74.6 per cent accuracy.

“Risk factors used are the baby’s weight change in the first year, mother’s pre-pregnancy height and weight, father’s height and weight, baby’s sleep pattern in the first year, premature birth, if the mother smoked during pregnancy and if the baby is female,” Dr Canfell said.

Dr Canfell said obesity prevention was most effective in the first 1000 days of life and that i-PATHWAY could be used in this period to prioritise prevention for babies at high risk.

“Almost one-in-four Australian children live with an unhealthy weight,” he said.

“Identifying babies at high risk means that clinicians and families can be proactive together to implement preventive actions that are family-based.

“We chose to predict childhood obesity at age eight or nine years because the older the child with obesity, the more likely they are to live with obesity as an adult.

“This is critical to help prevent obesity in the long-term.”

The i-PATHWAY study used data from almost 2000 children followed from birth to the age of nine in the ‘Raine Study’ in Western Australia.

“The data has shown predicting childhood obesity in Australia is possible, but before clinicians – such as GPs and Child Health Nurses – can use i-PATHWAY in practice, we need to test the model in a different group of children to confirm its predictions are still valid,” he said.

“Once i-PATHWAY is validated in a different group, we can then test i-PATHWAY in practice and see how effective it is in helping to prevent childhood obesity.”

Health and Wellbeing Queensland Chief Executive Dr Robyn Littlewood, who co-supervised Dr Canfell’s PhD research program, said supporting children and families in the early years had the potential to transform lives.

“Every single child and family is so important, which is why approaches based on prevention are critical,” Dr Littlewood said.

“As Queensland’s prevention agency, we’re empowering clinicians to integrate prevention into their practice and work with them on referral pathways that support Queensland children and families in their homes and communities.

“Our prevention programs can complement i-PATHWAY in the future.”

Dr Canfell now works with the Queensland Digital Health Research Network at UQ.

“That network was just recognised by UQ as a Global Change Initiative and that is a gateway to the next phase of research that will transform i-PATHWAY into a useful clinical tool,” he said.

The i-PATHWAY research was published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health and was co-authored by Dr Robyn Littlewood, Dr Olivia Wright and Dr Jacqueline Walker. (DOI:10.1111/jpc.15436).

Media: Dr Oliver Canfell, o.canfell@uq.edu.au, 3346 7003, 0434 911 538; Faculty of Medicine Communications, med.media@uq.edu.au, 3365 5118, 0436 368 746

University of Queensland students are the first cohort to experience interprofessional practice education and training in Metro North Hospital and Health Service’s new Surgical, Treatment and Rehabilitation Service (STARS).

Metro North and UQ have signed a 20-year partnership to integrate clinical care, education and training, and research in specialist surgical and complex rehabilitation services at STARS.

The 182-bed “digital ready” hospital is set to reduce patient wait lists and increase access to specialist treatment for approximately 100,000 Queenslanders each year.

UQ’s Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences Executive Dean Professor Bruce Abernethy said students would benefit from a high standard of quality clinical exposure, complex rehabilitation services and working in interprofessional teams.

“UQ students currently on placement include medicine, social work, psychology, nursing, occupational therapy, dietetics and speech pathology students, and physiotherapy students will start in April,” Professor Abernethy said.

“The clinical education STARS facilitates supports UQ’s interprofessional education curriculum, providing sought after clinical placement experiences for students.

“The physical design of the building is unique to other hospitals in Australia, breaking down the barriers between clinical disciplines and departments, and the design of the building is planned deliberately to promote interprofessional practice.

“The genuine commitment to bring together the worlds of clinical care, clinical education and clinical research is very exciting.”

Research centres that have relocated or commenced in STARS include UQ’s RECOVER Injury Research Centre and the Queensland Aphasia Research Centre.

Professor Nadine Foster, Director of STARS Research and Education said the partnership would enable clinically led education, training and research that makes a difference.

“All healthcare systems are struggling with a similar challenge of how to meet the increasing healthcare needs and expectations of our ageing population in ways that are effective and affordable,” Professor Foster said.

“To achieve this, we need healthcare to be a learning system, embedding research and innovation in routine practice in ways that ensure that today’s research is tomorrow’s treatment.

“While the future of health includes an ageing population with greater multimorbidity, it also includes greater opportunities for education and prevention, better self-management and greater interdisciplinary collaboration.”

Media: UQ Communication, Kirsten O’Leary, k.oleary@uq.edu.au, +61 (0)412 307 594. @UQhealth

Traits that allow cancer cells to escape the body’s natural defence system and develop into tumours are actually a good indicator to a patient’s survival prognosis, according to University of Queensland researchers.

UQ Diamantina Institute researcher Dr Janin Chandra described the discovery as a “catch-22 situation” and good news for patients with either cervical or head and neck cancer who have immune inhibitory traits present in their tumours.

“Our natural defence system is programmed to pick up abnormal cancerous cells and destroy them before they can grow into a tumour mass and spread through our bodies,” Dr Chandra said.

“However, the tumour can grow by developing cunning strategies to either escape our natural defence system, or to actively block it.

“We call these strategies immune inhibition, and until recently we thought this trait was a bad thing.

“Our recent research has shown that tumours of patients with either cervical cancer or head and neck cancer which had many immune inhibition traits, had the best five-year survival prognosis compared to patients with tumours without the traits.”

The data also showed that tumours with immune inhibition traits also had high levels of defence system activity, which fight against cancer.

Dr Chandra said researchers now had a better understanding that having immune inhibition traits in the tumour was actually not bad, and in fact was a sign of immune activation.

People who lack this immune activity inside the tumour, regardless if ‘good’ or ‘bad’ immune activity, have a worse prognosis.

She said this knowledge had important implications in designing future therapies for cancer.

“On average only 20 percent of patients respond to new immune-targeted drugs, so we are organising a clinical research study to develop predictors of response to these drugs,” Dr Chandra said.

“You need to give patients that aren’t responding to treatment an alternative, so our research is geared to identify new targets that could be used for patients who don’t have any natural defence cells in their tumours.”

The research paper – Immune-inhibitory gene expression is positively correlated with overall immune activity and predicts increased survival probability of cervical cancer patients – is published in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences Molecular Diagnostics and Therapeutics (DOI: 10.3389/fmolb.2021.622643).

Image above: (from left to right) Bachelor of Science student Gavin Turrell, UQ Research Fellow Dr Meihua Yu, Dr Janin Chandra, Professor Ian Frazer, and UQ Research Fellow Dr Ahmed Mehdi.

Media: Dr Janin Chandra, j.chandra@uq.edu.au, 3443 6976; Faculty of Medicine Communications, med.media@uq.edu.au, 3365 5118, 0436 368 746.

A global health organisation and state-of-the-art laboratory at The University of Queensland are collaborating to support the development and evaluation of point-of-care diagnostics for malaria with new custom-made proteins.

PATH and UQ’s Protein Expression Facility will supply researchers with malaria proteins to improve point-of-care diagnostic tools and help reduce the burden of malaria, which continues to affect more than 200 million people and cause more than 400,000 deaths each year.

Director of UQ’s Protein Expression Facility Professor Linda Lua said the partnership would help malaria researchers develop new diagnostic tools.

“New tools to enable the development of highly sensitive diagnostics are urgently needed to reduce disease and death attributable to malaria,” Professor Lua said.

“PATH and UQ are pleased to announce the availability of highly specific and sensitive malaria antigen reagents for immunological tests.

“These custom proteins will facilitate the development and performance benchmarking of rapid, accurate and species-specific malaria diagnostics.

“The collaboration between PATH and UQ’s Protein Expression Facility to develop and commercialise highly specific and sensitive Plasmodium antigens for immunological tests will help developers, manufacturers and academic researchers to assess the reliability of malaria test results.”

Most life-threatening malaria cases are attributable to infection with Plasmodium falciparum parasites which causes liver and kidney failure, convulsions, and coma.

Professor Lua said there was an urgent need to develop diagnostic methods that are simple, sensitive, and Plasmodium species specific to treat people with mixed parasitical infections.

Senior Scientific Director and malaria diagnostics lead in the Diagnostics Program at PATH, Dr Gonzalo Domingo, said the accurate and rapid diagnosis of species-specific malaria infection presented a challenge in most countries where the disease was endemic.

“We are excited in our collaboration with The University of Queensland to provide custom malaria proteins that support the development of simple, sensitive immunological tests that are able to quickly and accurately differentiate Plasmodium species,” Dr Domingo said.

In PATH’s role as a catalytic product development partner, PATH hopes that the availability of these proteins will de-risk and incentivise diagnostic researchers and manufacturers in developing more appropriate rapid diagnostic tests for malaria.

These reagents are available for purchase and can be obtained directly from The University of Queensland’s Protein Expression Facility or by submitting an inquiry to pef@uq.edu.au.

Funding to support the development of custom proteins for malaria diagnostics has been provided to PATH by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Media: UQ Communications, communications@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3365 1120, +61 424 002 566.

Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease are in the firing line after researchers identified an attractive therapeutic drug target.

An international collaboration, co-led by University of Queensland researchers, has isolated and analysed the structure and function of a protein found in the brain’s nerve fibres called SARM1.

Dr Jeff Nanson said the protein was activated when nerve fibres were damaged by injury, disease, or as a side effect of certain drugs.

“After a damaging incident occurs, this protein often induces a form of nerve fibre degeneration – known as axon degeneration – a ‘self-destruct’ mechanism of sorts,” Dr Nanson said.

“This is a key pathological feature of many terrible neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, and also amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), traumatic brain injury, and glaucoma.

“There are currently no treatments to prevent this nerve fibre degeneration, but now we know that SARM1 is triggering a cascade of degeneration we can develop future drugs to precisely target this protein.

“This work will hopefully help design new inhibiting drugs that could stop this process in its tracks.”

Professor Bostjan Kobe said the researchers analysed the structure of the protein and defined its three-dimensional shape using X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy.

“With X-ray crystallography, we make proteins grow into crystals, and then shoot X-rays at the crystals to get diffraction,” Professor Kobe said.

“And with cryo-electron microscopy, we freeze small layers of solution and then visualise protein particles by a beam of electrons.

“The resulting 3D images of SARM1’s ring-like structure were simply beautiful, and truly allowed us to investigate its purpose and function.

“This visualisation was a highly collaborative effort, working closely with our partners at Griffith University and our industry partners.”

The researchers hope that the discovery is the start of a revolution in treatments for neurodegenerative disorders.

“It’s time we had effective treatments for these devastating disorders,” Dr Nanson said.

“We know that these types of diseases are strongly related to age, so in the context of an ageing population here in Australia and globally, these diseases are likely to increase.

“It’s incredibly important that we understand how they work and develop effective treatments.”

The research is published in Neuron (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.02.009).

The study was led by researchers at UQ, Griffith University, Washington University (St Louis), and industry partner Disarm Therapeutics.

Media: Dr Jeff Nanson, j.nanson@uq.edu.au, +61 400 145 681; Professor Bostjan Kobe, b.kobe@uq.edu.au, +61 407 009 170; Dominic Jarvis, dominic.jarvis@uq.edu.au, +61 413 334 924.