Dear All,

Since this is the first SMS newsletter of the year I should be saying welcome back and I hope you are well rested from you summer break. But we are already well into the start of semester and I am sure the summer (or lack of it) is a distant memory. 2017 shapes as a busy and important year for the School.

We will have our School review site visit on the 8 and 9^th of May. In this regard I need to thank the small team led by Barbara O’Connor that has put together the Review Documentation – not a small job for a School of our size. We will shortly circulate this documentation and will hold a School forum to discuss some of the questions that we have posed in the documentation for the appointed panel to review.

We are coming to the end of the ADPR interview process and hopefully you have found the new process delivered via Career Tools an improvement on the old APR process. Being a new process I am sure that we can improve upon it in terms of its organisation and I would welcome feedback on this area. 2017 will also be the year in which we will need to compile our PBRF evidence portfolios. So if you have a paper that you are meaning to publish now is the time.

I am pleased to say that our enrolments in the new MBiomedSc and BBiomedSc(Hons) programmes that are now administered by the School for the first time have strong enrolments, and in 2017 we will be looking to further develop these pathways to grow student numbers.

Finally, as part of our strategy of leadership succession planning across the School I am happy to announce a new leadership team for the Department of Molecular Medicine and Pathology. Associate Professor Alan Davidson will take on the role of Head of Department effective the 1^st of April (yes April Fool’s Day!!). While Associate Professor Thomas Proft will be appointed as Deputy HOD to provide better representation for the Infection and Immunity cluster in this large Department. MMP has been ably led for a number of years by Professor Peter Browett and I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank Peter for his service and leadership to MMP, the School and the wider Faculty. We are of course not losing Peter’s leadership as he will still play a central role in shaping the critically important Academic Health Alliance.

Regards,

Professor Paul Donaldson
Head of School, School of Medical Sciences
Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences

The School of Medical Sciences would like to congratulate our two newly appointed Professors to the School of Medical Sciences.  Professor Michelle Glass and Professor Lai-Ming Ching.  Both professors achieved a PhD at the University of Auckland and have risen up through the ranks to become leaders in their respective area of research.

Professor Michelle Glass is the new Academic Director of the School of Medical Sciences, and also lectures in the Department of Pharmacology.  Her Research is focussed on receptor signalling, with a specific interest in the function and therapeutic potential of cannabinoid receptors.

Professor Lai-Ming Ching’ is a lead researcher at our Auckland Cancer Research Centre, investigating new drugs to help the body's immune system fight cancer.

She is passionate about understanding the interactions between the immune system and cancer, as she believes it will lead to the development of immunotherapies capable of providing patients with long-term protection against the disease.

Lai-Ming has supervised many students and continues to mentor and support her former students after they have graduated.

The School of Medical Sciences would like to welcome Dr Yonis Abukar.  Yonis has just recently joined Dr Rohit Ramchandra's team in the Department of Physiology as a Post-Doctoral Research fellow.  Prior to coming to the University of Auckland, Yonis studied his PhD with Professor Clive May from the University of Melbourne.

Yonis's research is examining the role of respiratory sinus arrhythmia in hypertensive and heart failure in sheep.

Jane Wylie  has been employed to manage a patient study entitled 'Megakaryocyte and Platelet Biology Study (MegBio)'  that will examine pathways deregulated in blood cancers with an aim to identify new targets for therapies.

Jane will coordinate access to retrospective cancer samples through LabPlus and facilitate banking of new samples prospectively. Jane is a very experienced research nurse and clinical trials manager who previously worked for Cancer Trials New Zealand.

Congratulations to Professor Louise Nicholson who was awarded a commemorative medallion in recognition of her nine years of service organising the annual Brain Bee Challenge in New Zealand.

Professor Nicholson from our Centre for Brain Research established the Brain Bee Challenge here in New Zealand in 2007. She was the National Co-ordinator of the competition from 2007 to 2016.

Professor Nicholson led the national organisation for each Brain Bee Challenge ensuring that secondary schools throughout New Zealand had the opportunity to take part in either the North or South Island annual challenge. 

Louise has handed over the organising reigns to Associate Professor Maurice Curtis.  Associate Professor Debbie Young will take over the North Island regional final from Professor Nicholson.

Congratulations to PhD student Jessy Kong from the School of Medical Sciences who was awarded the Keith Williamson Medal for Excellence in Microscopy Research at the 28^th New Zealand Conference on Microscopy. 

Jessy’s research is on ‘developing novel imaging to visualise the lens circulation system’ supervised by Professor Paul Donaldson.

A warm welcome to the new postgraduate students in the School

Orientation sessions were held last week for students in the MHSc (Nutrition and Dietetics) programme and a separate welcome and two day “skills session” for all the new students undertaking Honours or Masters research projects in 2017.

These students include the first cohort of the new MBiomedSc and BBiomedSc(Hons) as well as students in MSc and BSc (Hons) in Pharmacology or Physiology. Across the three subject plans there are 29 Honours and 27 Masters students enrolled.

I am sure that these new members of the SMS research teams will be warmly welcomed onto the research floors.

The continued support of the staff of the School helps us to be a major provider of quality postgraduate research supervision in the Faculty.

Researchers at the University of Auckland have provided the first strong evidence on how Parkinson’s disease spreads in the brain, helping to advance treatment of the disease.

In a paper, published today in Scientific Reports – Nature, the study revealed that pathological proteins (known as Lewy bodies) in Parkinson’s disease could be spread from cell to cell.

“This theory of Parkinson’s disease spread is topical, but here we have the first proof in cell culture of the mechanism controlling the spread,” says Associate Professor Maurice Curtis from the University’s Centre for Brain Research, who leads the Centre’s research on Parkinson’s disease.

“The implication is that if there is a spread of the Lewy bodies in the brain then the spread could be stopped early on,” he says. “This new mechanism of pathology spread provides us with new targets to go after for development of Parkinson’s disease treatments.

Read more 

Dr Maggie Kalev et al have recently had a paper published in Platelets entitled 'Inhibition of NMDA receptor function with an anti-GluN1-S2 antibody impairs human platelet function and thrombosis'.   The paper is how Abnormal platelet function influences disorders such as stroke, inflammation and cancer. This collaborative work demonstrates that inhibition of calcium entry into platelets inhibits thrombosis but preserves early platelet activity. Our findings point to new therapeutic opportunities in human disease that could avoid bleeding complications.  The authors involved in this paper are Taryn N. Green (UoA), Justin R. Hamilton (Monash University, Melbourne), Marie-Christine Morel-Kopp (Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney), Zhaohua Zheng (Monash University, Melbourne), Ting-Yu T. Chen (UoA), James I. Hearn (UoA), Peng P. Sun (UoA), Jack U. Flanagan (UoA), Deborah Young (UoA), P. Alan Barber (UoA, ADHB), Matthew J. During (UoA, The Ohio State University, US), Christopher M. Ward (Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney) & Maggie L. Kalev-Zylinska (UoA, ADHB).

Read paper

The Cardio-Renal Lab in the Department of Physiology investigates autonomic control of the circulation during normal physiology and pathophysiology. The lab is led by Dr. Rohit Ramchandra and the emphasis of current projects is translational. We are interested in how the autonomic nervous system changes and adapts during pathophysiology and how this can be targeted to improve outcomes in people with heart failure/hypertension.

All work is integrative in nature and performed in large animal translational models of disease. The research team has a unique skillset which includes direct measurement of autonomic nerve activity. Research projects in the lab are currently examining: (i) the role of respiratory sinus arrhythmia in modulating heart function in heart failure, (ii) the role of carotid body chemoreceptors as a therapeutic target in hypertension, (iii) the role of intracranial pressure in modulating baseline levels of arterial pressure, and (iv) the impact of long blurbs about how research labs are 'special' on reader interest (well done on getting this far). All projects are typically inter-disciplinary and involve collaborators from within and outside the School of Medicine. The group currently includes

• Dr. Rohit Ramchandra
• Mr. Yonis Abukar,
• Ms. Bindu George,
• Mr. Tycho Tromp
• Mr. Joshua Chang
• Mr. Dylan Pen