Acceleration Partners

To find a single medical breakthrough – one that changes our understanding of cancer, dementia, immunology, or infectious diseases – and could benefit hundreds of thousands of Australians.

This program was established to bring together a group of like-minded philanthropists with the aim of accelerating the pace of transformational research discovery.

Acceleration Partners make targeted investments in two of our most promising research projects each year, assessed by experts as being on the cusp of critical discovery.

Associate Professor Ian Majewski leads a research group investigating why there is such a large variation in how individual cancer patients respond to anti-cancer therapy, and why some cancers run in families.

By better understanding how the ageing process works at the molecular level, Ian and his team can predict and prevent a wide range of age-related diseases, including many types of cancer, inflammation and neuro-degeneration.

The development of a world-first model – which speeds up genomic ageing to study both agents of DNA damage and DNA repair – has vast translational potential, including:

• the discovery of new therapeutic targets for ageing – drugs to enhance DNA repair activity and slow DNA damage
• new diagnostic tools to detect variations in DNA damage and repair activity, to identify individuals at greater risk of developing cancer

Dr Nadia Kershaw will be leading a project that looks at molecular ‘messengers’ known as cytokines and how disfunction can lead to a group of blood cancers known as myeloproliferative diseases. In these cancers, defective blood cells go into overdrive, damaging the bone marrow and eventually compromising the body’s ability to produce healthy cells.

By gaining a deeper understanding of the Thrombopoietin Receptor, Nadia and her team hope to learn how to ‘switch off’ the excessive signalling that results in the development of myeloproliferative diseases.

By understanding how and why cytokines swing into action (including misdirected action), we can harness the body’s own defence systems to also fight myriad inflammatory and immune system disorders.