Under Professor Cory’s leadership, WEHI focused on four big global medical challenges: cancer, immunity, autoimmunity and infectious diseases.
New disciplines were embraced, including bioinformatics, structural biology, medicinal chemistry, genomics and large-scale targeted mutagenesis, enabling a truly multidisciplinary approach to tackling human disease.
WEHI became a world leader in apoptosis research, following the discovery in 1988 by Professor David Vaux with Professor Cory and Professor Jerry Adams that the gene causing human follicular lymphoma acts by blocking the central cell death pathway.
Other key achievements of the period included:
- The identification, for the first time, of the breast stem cell
- The discovery of how immune responses are regulated by apoptosis, the natural program of cell death
- Pioneering a systems biology approach to understanding the immune system
- Development of vaccines for type 1 diabetes and coeliac disease
- A promising new treatment for rheumatoid arthritis
- Significant advances in malaria research including development of vaccine candidates
- Enormous strides forward in understanding the regulation of blood cell production
- Building development
Like her predecessor, Sir Gustav Nossal, Professor Cory was faced with an organisation rapidly outgrowing its premises.
She was instrumental in securing funding and key stakeholder support for the $185 million redevelopment of the Parkville building. Completed in 2012, the redeveloped building doubled the Institute’s research capacity and provided world-class laboratories to support and inspire our staff.