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...

🇰🇷 이 글의 한국어 버전 읽기 / 🇬🇧 Read this post in English   WEHI, 래스커상 3인의 계보 호주 멜버른, 그것도 한국에는 잘 알려지지 않은 한 연구소가 노벨상급 과학자를 세 명이나 배출했다면 믿으시겠어요? 저는 지금 그 연구소에서 일하고 있습니다. 멜버른 파크빌의 플레밍턴 로드를 걷다 보면 월터 앤 엘리자 홀 의학연구소(Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, WEHI)를 지나치게 됩니다 — 놀랍게도 지난 70년간 세 명의 앨버트 래스커상(Albert Lasker Award) 수상자를 배출한, 바로 제가 일하는 곳이에요. 래스커상은 흔히 " 미국의 노벨상 "이라 불립니다. 기초의학연구 및 임상의학연구 부문에서 수상한 90여 명의 과학자 중 상당수가 이후 노벨상까지 거머쥐었기 때문이에요. 그래서 래스커상 수상자가 발표되면 과학계는 촉각을 곤두세웁니다. 머지않아 노벨상 소식이 뒤따를지도 모른다는 것을, 역사가 보여주고 있기 때문이죠. 이 세 명의 래스커상 수상자는 모두 같은 멜버른의 한 연구소 출신입니다. 이는 단순한 흥미로운 사실을 넘어, 과학 문화가 세대를 거듭하며 어떻게 축적되는지를 보여주는 하나의 사례 연구로서 곱씹어볼 만한 패턴이에요. 해외에서 일하는 한국인 연구자로서, 대체 이 연구소가 그토록 오랫동안 무엇을 제대로 해온 것인지, 저 역시 궁금해졌다. 그 세 사람이 누구인지, 그리고 서로 전혀 다른 이 발견들을 은밀히 연결하는 고리가 무엇인지 지금부터 함께 살펴볼게요. 프랭크 맥팔레인 버넷 경 (1952년) 버넷은 면역학과 바이러스학 분야의 기초 연구로 기초의학연구 부문 래스커상 을 수상했고, 이후 수십 년간 해당 분야 전체의 토대가 될 기반을 마련했습니다. 이후 그는 수년간 WEHI 소장을 역임했는데, 그 과정에서 메트칼프나 밀러가 이 연구소에 발을 들이기 훨씬 전부터 연구소의 연구 문화를 형성해 나...

  The Lasker Award vs. the Nobel Prize: What's the Difference? Quick Poll If you had to bet, which would you rather win first? Roughly 90+ Lasker laureates have gone on to win a Nobel Prize. Does that change your answer? Thanks for voting! Results reflect votes from your browser. Take a guess before you keep reading. If you follow medical research long enough, you'll notice a pattern: a scientist wins the Lasker Award, and a few years later — sometimes the very same year, sometimes a decade on — their name turns up again for a Nobel Prize. It happens often enough that the Lasker has earned its nickname, "America's Nobel." But the two prizes aren't the same thing wearing different medals. They differ in scope, origin, selection process, and what they're actually trying to reward. Keep your answer in mind — by the end of this post, you may have changed it. Scale and Scope The Nobel Prize in Physiology o...

  Decoding Drug Names: Why "-mab," "-nib," and "-clax" Aren't Random If you've spent any time reading about modern medicine, you've probably noticed that drug names seem to follow a pattern. Venetoclax * (sold under the brand name Venclexta or Venclyxto, AbbVie and Roche). Pembrolizumab (sold under the brand name Keytruda, Merck). Imatinib (sold under the name of Gleevec, Novartis). Olaparib (sold under the brand name Lynparza, AstraZeneca and Merck). They sound engineered — and they are. These endings aren't marketing choices or accidents of pronunciation. They're part of a deliberate, internationally coordinated naming system that tells scientists, doctors, and pharmacists exactly what kind of drug they're looking at before they read a single word of the label. The system is overseen by naming bodies like the United States Adopted Names (USAN) Council and the International Nonproprietary Names (INN) program globally. They are re...

🇰🇷 이 글의 한국어 버전 읽기 / 🇬🇧 Read this post in English   From Melbourne Lab to Global Cancer Drug: The Story Behind Venetoclax On the morning of July 28, 2017, I walked into work expecting an ordinary Friday. Instead, television cameras filled the entrance to the main auditorium, and the seventh-floor tea room buzzed with anticipation. By the end of the morning, we learned that decades of research at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute had culminated in an announcement worth up to US$325 million—one that demonstrated how fundamental science could ultimately change the lives of cancer patients around the world. This is the story behind that moment. A Bench-to-Bedside Story: A 25-Year Journey Venetoclax's origin story traces back to Melbourne, Australia, and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) . In the late 1980s, WEHI researchers, led by Professor Jerry Adams, Professor Suzanne Cory, and Professor Andreas Strasser made the foundational discovery t...

  Venetoclax: How a "Molecular Off-Switch" Is Changing Blood Cancer Treatment If you follow oncology news, you've probably seen the name venetoclax (brand name Venclexta ) come up again and again over the past decade. It's one of the more quietly transformative drugs in modern cancer care — not because it grabs headlines, but because it represents a genuinely different way of killing cancer cells: by switching their self-destruct mechanism back on.  Read a remarkable bench-to-bedside story behind Venetoclax: A 25-Year Journey here . Here's a plain-language tour of what venetoclax is, how it works, who it treats, and where it's headed. The Basic Idea: Cancer Cells That Forget How to Die Every cell in your body carries the machinery for a kind of programmed self-destruction called apoptosis . It's a normal, healthy process — old or damaged cells are supposed to die and be cleared away. Cancer cells, though, are notoriously good at disabling this ma...