Snow Medical announces two more $8m research fellowships

The Snow family has given over $200m, and counting, to medical research and their latest two fellowships, worth $8m each, could lead to huge health benefits.

Loic Yengo and his research team at the University of Queensland’s statistical genomics lab. Photo: Jane Ilsley

Canberra Airport owners the Snow family have announced two more $8m long-term grants to individual scientists whom they believe will make landmark medical breakthroughs.

The kicker is that neither of them are medical researchers.

The Snow Medical Research Foundation, which has poured over $200m into Australian medical research in the past several years, said that Australian National University chemist Lara Malins and University of Queensland statistical geneticist Loic Yengo will each receive $8m fellowships to fund their laboratories for eight years – enough time to test innovative ideas which could lead to major advances.

In a prescient prediction, in 2021 The Australian’s Research Magazine named Associate Professor Yengo as one of 40 Rising Stars of Australian research.

Snow Medical chair Tom Snow said the foundation was looking for researchers who would make the greatest impact, regardless of what field they come from.

“We’re trying to encourage the fertilisation of ideas between medicine and other areas,” he said.

Professor Malins, who heads a chemistry team at ANU whose expertise is in building and analysing complex molecules, aims to create new antibiotic and antimalarial drugs from peptides, which are sequences of amino acid molecules.

Peptides have been found to have huge promise as drugs, but the technical problem is how to make peptide molecules to a desired blueprint. “Producing them in the lab is the bottleneck,” she said, but she believes her research team can do it.

She said the increasing resistance of disease to antibiotic and antimalarial drugs in use at the moment was a problem and new drugs would help solve this.

Lara Malins. Photo: Jamie Kidston

Loic Yengo. Photo: Photo: Jane Ilsley

Professor Yengo who leads the statistical genomics lab at UQ’s Institute for Biomolecular Science, uses mathematics to delve into the huge data sets now available which match illnesses that people suffer from with the composition of their genome.

He said they are searching for the genetic factors which give people a predisposition to particular diseases, thus allowing them to use preventive measures earlier.

For example, Professor Yengo said 27 per cent of heart attacks occur in people with no obvious risk factors, and the underlying cause is thought to be genetic. If heart attacks, and other health problems, can be linked to specific genes which can be detected when people are young, then doctors will be able to give patients preventive treatments – or urge lifestyle changes – early enough to make a difference.

He said one problem was that current large genomic data sets are skewed toward people of European ancestry. But more data for non-Europeans are being produced, and he hopes to use them so his teams findings can be applied to all the world’s population.

Mr Snow said the normal customary three year medical research grants encouraged low risk projects. In contrast, the eight year Snow fellowships, of which 13 have been awarded since 2000, allow researchers to take risks to reach ambitious goals.

“Our foundation believes that supporting these emerging leaders with the independence, funding, and the time needed to innovate is crucial for driving the next generation of health and medical breakthroughs,” Mr Snow said.

Professor Malins said developing new medicines was costly and time consuming and the usual three year research grants “limits the types of projects and challenges you choose to tackle”.

Last year the foundation gave $100m to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute to find effective, personalised treatments for people with chronic immune diseases. It says it has now committed $224m to health and medical innovation in Australia.