UQCCR Seminar Series - 23 June 2021: Professor Paul Colditz and Dr Adam Rainczuk

Professor Paul Colditz - Communicating perinatal neuroscience research to a clinical audience: the what, how and why

Paul is Director of the Perinatal Research Centre, Head UQ Clinical School, and a practising neonatologist at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital. Paul's research focuses on clinically important perinatal health problems and translation to clinical practice. It includes investigations relating to brain injury and neuroprotection, seizure identification and treatment, neural plasticity and pathways to improving neurodevelopmental outcomes, environmental influences (e.g. nutrition, massage) on brain development and infant body composition. He has been lead CI on a number of multi-site randomized controlled trials. His group has become an international leader in the development of the preterm connectome using MRI

Dr Adam Rainczuk - How molecular information with spatial context transforms cancer research

Adam has been working as an Application Scientist with Bruker Australia since mid 2017. Before this, he was the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation fellow at the Hudson Institute for Medical Research (Victoria), working on early stage detection of ovarian cancer.

Overview: Over the past decade, numerous Omics approaches have offered new insight into molecular mechanisms occurring within and across the complex network of cells that make up tissue. Unfortunately, because of their solution-based approach, these techniques are largely unable to correlate specific molecular involvement to distinct cell phenotypes or localized regions within the tissue. Additionally, such approaches tend to dilute signals of interest by analyzing extracts from the tissue rather than extracts from the few cells of interest. What is needed is a new methodology for analyzing tissue that provides the same molecular depth as traditional Omics workflows, but which also retains the spatial relationship of those signals within the cellular network. SpatialOMx provides researchers with the ability to map molecular distributions in tissue in situ, identify regions of interest that express the desired molecular profile, and selectively target these subpopulations.