Snow fellows awarded $8m each to solve medical research challenges

Canberra’s Snow family has given three top medical researchers $8m each to aim high and take risks to solve big problems.

Gavin Knott at Monash University, is a new Snow Fellow. Photo: Simon Milder

Canberra’s Snow family has awarded another three $8m medical research grants with the aim of giving Australia’s brightest minds the freedom to pursue audacious, long-term research goals.

The three winning research teams – from Monash University, the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research – will each be granted $1m a year for eight years.

The latest annual round of grants from the Snow Medical Research Foundation means the Snow family, which owns Canberra airport, has now awarded nine grants worth $72m to fund medical researchers.

The grants, to be officially announced on Wednesday, award $8m Snow Fellowships to the three medical scientists who lead the winning research teams.

Emily Wong

They are Monash’s Gavin Knott, whose team which is seeking a protein tool to edit RNA; Victor Chang’s Emily Wong, whose team is investigating mysterious regions of human DNA known as the “dark genome” and their effect on heart disease; and WEHI’s Stephin Vervoort, whose team is probing how the transcription mechanism that codes messenger RNA from DNA sometimes fails and can cause cancer.

Snow Medical chairman Tom Snow said the foundation’s medical funding was different to most philanthropic donations in that it focused on supporting research talent, particularly in young researchers.

“Most philanthropies in this space look to fund buildings and equipment. Our family has a long-term commitment to investing in people,” he said.

Mr Snow said the money was to support the people in the research teams. “This is to supercharge their careers,” he said.

Stephin Vervoort

He said the eight-year term of the funding – compared with the usual three to five years from government funding agencies – meant team leaders had freedom to test ambitious ideas that might or might not work.

“We want them to take risks. We want them to fail as well as succeed, and we want them to think long term,” Mr Snow said.

He said all three teams were setting high goals.

Dr Knott’s team was one to two years ahead of others in its quest to find proteins to manipulate RNA in the same way that the CRISPR tool can engineer DNA, and Covid vaccines had shown the huge potential to be unlocked in messenger RNA, he said. “Providing this money means he will stay ahead of overseas researchers.”

Mr Snow said the goal of Dr Wong’s team was to decode the parts of the dark genome that were believed to affect the heart and to understand the role they played in heart disease.

“It’s a massive computing exercise. If she can map what the dark genome does she will be exceptional,” he said.

Finally, Dr Vervoort’s team is aiming to use its discoveries about the transcription of DNA to messenger RNA to point the way to new drugs that will attack some hard to treat cancers such as acute myeloid leukaemia, which has poor survival rate in adults.

Snow Medical already has committed to the next round grants in which two $8m fellowships will be awarded. But in each of the three annual rounds awarded so far the foundation, after examining the quality of applicants, has decided to award three. Each year about 100 applications are received.

Mr Snow said Snow Medical so far had committed to 11 $8m fellowships, plus other funding for Covid that lifted its philanthropic giving to $91.2m.

Asked whether the $8m fellowships would continue beyond the next annual round, Mr Snow said the family wanted the program to be ongoing. “We see this as a long-term program. We see it as a long-term legacy for medical research in Australia,” he said.