ACSRC reconfirmed as Faculty Research Centre
The ACSRC was recently re-endorsed as a Faculty Research Centre within the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences a part of a wider review of research centres within the University of Auckland. This continued support for the ACSRC comes twenty-five years after the then Cancer Research Laboratory formally joined the university and is a recognition of the continuing excellent research within the Centre.
MSc completion
Michael Brown has recently completed his MSc thesis, “What makes a good arylsulfatase substrate? Application in the design of antibody-drug conjugates” with Ben Dickson and Moana Tercel as supervisors within the ACSRC.
Publications
The team has had a paper published in the prestigious international journal Neurology – Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation:
Gonzalez-Fierro, C.; Fonte, C.; Dufourd, E.; Cazaentre, V.; Aydin, S.; Engelhardt, B.; Caspi, R.R.; Xu, B.; Martin-Blondel, G.; Spicer, J.A.; Trapani, J.A.; Bauer, J.; Liblau, R.S.; Bost,C. Effects of a small molecule perforin inhibitor in a mouse model of CD8 T cell-mediated neuroinflammation. Neurol. Neuroimmunol. Neuroinflamm. 2023, 10(4), e200117, 2023. https://nn.neurology.org/content/10/4/e200117
In this paper, perforin inhibitors developed by our team at the ACSRC and colleagues at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne with funding from the Wellcome Trust, were used by Professors Roland Liblau and Chloé Bost in Toulouse, France, to very effectively block and potentially reverse inflammation in the brain and eye resulting from abnormal (‘auto-immune’) activation of the immune system. In a series of studies in experimental mice that develop auto-immune vasculitis, which destroys the delicate cells lining minute blood vessels in the retina and brain, it was found that blocking perforin, a key protein normally used by the immune system to killvirus-infected cells, could greatly dampen immune damage in the mouse eye and brain. This experimental model closely mimics a disorder known as Susac Syndrome, and it was found that our drug could halt tissue damage, even if treatment is delayed for 48 hours after symptoms commence.
Ben Dickson off to greener pastures
The ACSRC warmly farewelled Dr Benjamin Dickson as he moved to a new appointment as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato in the School of Science. Ben has been at the Centre since 2014 and has worked across several projects including developing hypoxia activated prodrugs of PARP inhibitors, DNA-PK inhibitors and minor groove binding alkylators. Ben made a range of contributions to postgraduate teaching and student supervision as well as managing our chemical databases and we wish Ben all the best in his new role.
