thebiostories

  Donald Metcalf and the Mysterious Molecule That Made Blood Stem Cell Donation Possible On July 1st, 2011 — my first day at WEHI — the third person I met was Don Metcalf, right after Rosie the receptionist, who'd called my then-supervisor Ben to come pick me up. Ben introduced me to Don as a new postdoc from South Korea. Don asked me "whereabouts," meaning what region of South Korea I was from. I must have been so nervous that I completely misunderstood the question — as if he'd asked me where South Korea was — and I just repeated it back: "Where is South Korea?"Both Ben and Don burst out laughing. That was my first encounter with the man whose legacy this story is really about. Professor Donald Metcalf AC (26 February 1929 – 15 December 2014) was an outstanding medical researcher whose discovery of colony-stimulating factors has benefited more than 20 million people worldwide. Most people who register as a blood stem cell donor never think much ...

  Jacques Miller and T for Thymus: The Last Organ to Give Up Its Secret For centuries, the thymus — a small, pinkish gland sitting behind the breastbone — was considered biological dead weight. Physicians assumed it was little more than a graveyard for dying white blood cells, a leftover structure with no real job to do. Then, in 1961, a 30-year-old researcher named Jacques Miller proved everyone wrong, and in doing so became, by most accounts, the last person to discover the function of a human organ . A Discovery Born from Studying Leukemia Miller wasn't setting out to solve one of immunology's great mysteries. Working as a PhD student at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, he was investigating a virus that causes leukemia in mice. Almost incidentally, he found that removing a mouse's thymus early in life dramatically changed the animal's fate — and its immune system. Mice thymectomized (had their thymus removed) shortly after birth became high...

Frank Macfarlane Burnet: The Nobel Prize Winner Who Shaped Modern Immunology  Quick Poll Who do you think is Australia's most influential scientist? Thanks for voting! Results reflect votes from your browser. If you asked most people to name a famous Australian scientist, you'd probably hear Howard Florey, the man behind penicillin's development into a usable drug. Maybe Peter Doherty, or more recently, Elizabeth Blackburn. Far fewer people would say Frank Macfarlane Burnet — and that's a genuine oversight, because his ideas quietly underpin almost everything modern medicine understands about the immune system. Burnet never discovered a single blockbuster drug. He did something arguably more foundational: he figured out how the immune system tells the difference between "you" and "not you." Understanding that distinction is the reason organ transplants can work at all, and part of the theoret...

🇰🇷 이 글의 한국어 버전 읽기 / 🇬🇧 Read this post in English     Three Lasker Awards, One Address: The Institute That Keeps Producing Breakthroughs Walk down Flemington Road in Parkville, Melbourne, and you'll pass the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) — a building, my workplace, that has, remarkably, produced three Albert Lasker Award laureates across seven decades. The Lasker is often called "America's Nobels": of the roughly 90-plus scientists honored in its basic and clinical research categories, a striking number have gone on to win the Nobel Prize itself. When a Lasker is announced, the scientific community pays close attention, because history says a Nobel might not be far behind. Three of those Lasker laureates trace back to the same Melbourne institute. It's a pattern worth pausing on — not just as a trivia fact, but as a case study in how scientific culture compounds across generations. It made me want to understand what, e...

🇰🇷 이 글의 한국어 버전 읽기 / 🇬🇧 Read this post in English   호주 멜버른에서 시작된 표적항암제 베네토클락스(Venetoclax) 탄생기: 25년의 여정 2017년 7월 28일, 여느 때와 다름없던 출근길 아침이었습니다. 그런데 연구소 7층 티룸이 유난히 분주했어요. 대강당 입구에 설치된 여러 방송용 카메라를 보니, 큰 이벤트가 준비되고 있는 모양이었습니다. 이날 저를 포함한 연구소 직원들은 놀라운 소식을 접하게 됩니다. 이날 발표된 전대미문의 뉴스, 그리고 그 뒤에 숨겨진 25년간의 여정과 의미를 짧게 다뤄보고자 합니다. 베네토클락스(Venetoclax)의 기원은 호주 멜버른에 있는 월터 앤 엘리자 홀 의학연구소(Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, WEHI) 로 거슬러 올라갑니다. 1980년대 후반, WEHI의 제리 애덤스(Jerry Adams) 교수, 수잔 코리(Suzanne Cory) 교수, 안드레아스 스트라서(Andreas Strasser) 교수가 이끄는 연구진은 BCL-2라는 단백질이 암세포 스스로의 아포토시스(세포자살)를 차단함으로써 암세포가 무한히 생존하도록 돕는다는 근본적인 사실을 발견했어요. 이 발견은 수십 년 후 베네토클락스 개발의 전체 이론적 근거가 되었습니다. 이 기초과학적 발견은 이후 약 30년에 걸쳐, WEHI와 제약회사 제넨텍(Genentech) (로슈 그룹 소속), 애브비(AbbVie) 의 연구 협력을 통해 임상 약물로 발전했고, 초기 임상시험은 로열 멜버른 병원(Royal Melbourne Hospital) 과 피터 맥칼럼 암센터(Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre) 의 호주 혈액전문의들이 주도했어요. 그 여정은 다음과 같이 전개되었습니다. 1988년 — 암세포 죽음의 열쇠를 쥔 BCL-2 유전자 발견 2000년 — 구조생물학이 단백질 구조 연구에 새로운 지평을 열며 세포사 연...