UNSW researchers scoop the pool

UNSW researchers have won three of four Development Grants awarded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) in NSW.

Minister for Health Tony Abbott has announced funding of more than $2 million to support 14 medical research teams nationally.

Professor Minas Coroneo, of the department of ophthalmology at Prince of Wales and Sydney Children’s Hospitals, and his team were awarded $186,750 to develop a bionic eye to restore visual perception for blind patients. The device will be implanted in the brain and, if successful, will restore enough sight to let a person ‘see’ their surroundings. Team members include Professor John Morley, of the school of medical sciences, and Dr Vivek Chowdhury of the Prince of Wales clinical school.

“The device will electrically stimulate the visual area of the brain,” Professor Coroneo said. “This creates the visual perception of spots of light in patients who are otherwise blind. By matching these spots of light with a digital picture of the surroundings from a camera, blind patients will receive a very basic visual perception of their environment.” Professor Coroneo’s industry partners are Cochlear Ltd and Sydney Biotech Pty Ltd.

Scientia Professor Staffan Kjelleberg, of the school of biotechnology and biomolecular sciences, was awarded $145,135 to develop antibacterial biomedical devices.

Professor Kjelleberg’s project will develop new materials that prevent bacterial colonisation on catheters and related medical equipment. "Bacterial colonisation of the surface of biomedical devices represents a significant health threat,“ Professor Kjelleberg said. “Our technology is based on compounds from a marine alga that stop bacteria growing,” he said. “Work so far has demonstrated tremendous potential for this technology.”

Professor of Medical Informatics, Enrico Coiera, of the Centre for Health Informatics, was awarded $122,000 to further develop an on-line evidence-based decision support for health professionals, called QuickClinical.

”Web information retrieval is of growing importance to clinicians as they struggle to keep up with an exponential growth in published research,“ Professor Coiera said. ”While the Internet has significantly increased access to evidence that can support clinical decisions, clinicians still struggle to get the information they need, and if their questions go unanswered, there can be significant consequences for their patients.”

QuickClinical is an evidence delivery system that uses intelligent search filter technology to returning only the most relevant evidence for given clinical tasks. This grant will allow a research prototype to be taken to early commercialisation stage, ready to be developed in different environments for different clinical users.