Dr Tim Newsome wins Selby Research Award for 2008!

The Selby Scientific Foundation has made available the Selby Research Award to assist an outstanding academic to establish his or her research career. Eligibility for the award is restricted to academic staff members who have dual teaching and research responsibilities and who are within five years of their first appointment at Level B or C at the University of Sydney in the physical, chemical or biochemical disciplines.

Dr Tim Newsome’s group have uncovered a surprising role for Abl-family kinases, infamous for their oncogenic role in chronic myloid leukemia, in the regulation of the intercellular transport of vaccinia virus. Vaccinia virus is the best-characterised member of the poxvirus family, used to vaccinate against smallpox during the eradication campaign led by WHO. Intriguingly, treatment of vaccinia-infected cells with the anti-cancer drug glivec (Novartis Pharmaceuticals) attenuates the spread of virus in a variety of cell culture-based assays. This is good news as smallpox is one of the most feared biological weapons, yet no treatment is currently available.

Tim’s successful application to the Selby Foundation for this award will allow him to address two critical questions to assess the potential of glivec as a treatment for smallpox. How effective is glivec in treating poxvirus infections in vivo? And what are the relevant molecular targets of glivec during virus egress? These studies will enable us to gauge the therapeutic potential of glivec as an antiviral.

Cytoskeletal rearrangements induced by infection with a poxvirus and important to facilitate cell-to-cell spread: a target for glivec?