Senior Research Fellow, University of New South Wales
Hevolution/AFAR New Investigator Awards in Aging Biology and Geroscience Research - 2022
What inspired you to pursue aging research?
My PhD training as a biochemist was in the field of Type 2 Diabetes, where energy sensing pathways are critical to insulin resistance. At the time I always thought of metabolic disease as a really interesting, fundamental biological problem – where to store or use, and how to respond to nutrients? It turns out these same molecular pathways are critical to the biology of aging, which impacts nearly every single aspect of health, and by its definition impacts every single person who does not die earlier from other diseases. To me, understanding and developing strategies to impact aging is the ultimate challenge in biology today, let alone in medicine, where even mildly effective strategies that could delay age-related disease could have profound impacts on society. Probably the most stark example of this was the recent pandemic, where even now, I don’t think most people can numerically grasp the magnitude of the role of age as a risk factor for severe disease; the role of age in host-pathogen interactions is a fundamental aspect of SARS-CoV-2 infection, and is likely a conserved feature of other coronavirus family members, with similar age-mortality patterns for SARS and MERS.
In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean for you to receive an AFAR grant now?
I am based at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia where the field is a lot smaller, and I’ve always looked up to both the incredible research and research community in the United States. An absolute highlight every two years for me is getting to spending a week at Cold Spring Harbor with this amazing community, and the recent FASEB/AGE meeting on reproductive aging in California was one of the most enjoyable meetings I have been to. Having a society like AFAR that can organize and fund researchers is an incredible asset to the entire field, and I’ve aspired to help advance the field in a similar way by kicking off a local conference series for the field, which was called the Australian Biology of Ageing Conference. This was put on hiatus for a couple of years due to the pandemic, but I’m looking forward to the next one and to hopefully inviting some AFAR members out for it!
In terms of receiving this AFAR grant, this means a lot to me—it is critical support that will allow me to keep the lab open and conduct this research program, which I am incredibly excited about. It is a privilege to be able to write a proposal based around fundamental questions in biology, rather than clinical impac—not because that impact won’t come in the future, but because those future impacts will require research that is absolutely focused on understanding how these disease process works.
What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?
One of the greatest social challenges today is in achieving gender equality in education, career opportunities and income. Taking time off work or training to have a baby and care for a young child—the latter of which disproportionately impacts women—often means that couples delay parenting until later ages. This sadly pushes up against hard barriers to natural fertility, resulting in the need for invasive and expensive assisted reproductive technologies which have a poor success rate. We recently discovered a new intervention in mice that could improve reproductive outcomes with age. Aside from impacting fertility, improving ovarian health could be incredibly important to improving overall late-life health in women, due to the role of ovarian decline and menopause in driving age-related diseases such as osteoporosis. In addition to this, accelerated ovarian decline can occur due to chemotherapy treatment in cancer patients, leading to age-related disease at a younger age. It is highly likely that the biology of aging is different between sexes, with a need for tailored strategies for males and females—this work aims to address the biology of aging in women, through discovering new pathways that control aging in the ovary.
How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?
My work aims to understand how cells in the ovary use energy as women grow older, so that we can develop new drugs or other strategies to restore this. If successful, it will result in new medicines that can not only extend female fertility, but improve overall women’s health as they grow older. This could also be used to improve the health of girls and women who survive cancer, as they can be at risk of age-related diseases due to the impacts of the chemotherapy drugs they received during treatment.
