Phenomics Australia reposted this
Scarlett Mayfield-Smith isn’t even three years old, but the Brisbane toddler has already had more than 50 ambulance rides to hospital. Now an unlikely combo of tarantula venom and synthetic brains has given hope to her and her family, as well as thousands of other patients whose epilepsy is not treatable by medication. 📖 In this excellent feature read, Janelle Miles at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) tells us exactly how a team of The University of Queensland’s brightest minds is harnessing stem cell technology and venom-based drug discovery to find new and more effective treatments: https://lnkd.in/geH2qee7 Janelle’s three-minute piece will tell you all about spider venom peptides, organoids, genetic epilepsy, as well as: 💸 How the AIBN’s Professor Ernst Wolvetang and Professor Glenn King from the UQ Institute for Molecular Bioscience will use their $4.1m Medical Research Future Fund grant to push for new solutions 🧠 Why AIBN researcher Dr Selin Pars plans to collect blood samples from patients in order to create 800 tiny synthetic brains 🧪 Why Professor Michael Kassiou sees organoids as an ideal vessel to test the effectiveness of experimental drugs for humans, and 👪 The ways in which this research could improve the lives of people with refractory epilepsy, according to Epilepsy Queensland interim CEO Sandi Rodiger