Research, Innovation and Technology

Meet Dr Garron Dodd

Laboratory Head, Department of Anatomy and Physiology

^{Image: Dodd Research Group}

What area of research are you interested in?

I’m a Senior Lecturer within the Department of Anatomy and Physiology and Head of the Metabolic Neuroscience Laboratory. I’m interested in how the brain works, in particular how the brain goes wrong in metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes.

What piqued your curiosity about human health and biomedical sciences?

My passion for neuroscience was sparked during a series of public lectures I attended during high school. The lectures were exploring how psychoactive drugs work in the brain and they have informed our understanding of consciousness. I was intrigued by the idea of a brain trying to understand itself.

What was the driving factor to becoming a biomedical scientist?

Curiosity and using a skill set I felt I was good at to help people. I felt that becoming a biomedical scientist allowed me to ask grand questions and address the big global health challenges of our lifetime.

Explain the background to your research and your main findings so far?

My research explores how the brains control metabolism; this is everything from how hungry we feel to how our blood sugar levels are controlled. We have identified the brain circuits that control appetite, and we design drugs and other therapeutics to hi-jack this pathway to treat obesity.

What impact do you hope your research will ultimately have on improving quality of life?

My vision is to develop effective treatments for metabolic diseases to save lives and improve people’s quality of life across the globe. In addition, I want to understand the brain and deliver new knowledge and insights into how the brain works that will hopefully inspire and help the next generations long after I’m gone.

Explain the advances in technology that are changing the way this area of research is conducted?

It has always been incredibly difficult to study the brain. However, the genetic revolution that has occurred over the past decade has made a lot of impossible feats possible. Using transgenics, we can genetically dissect specific cell types in the brain and in particular areas and see how the cell or circuits regulate behaviours. We can also trap “memories” in the brain, such as the feeling of hunger and recall them whenever we want. We can visualise protein and nucleic acid structure not just in small areas of brain tissue down a microscope, but also at a whole-brain level and see what connects to what and how this changes over time. We can visualise the firing of brain cells deep within the brain in real-time and see how they change in response to the external world. We can also use stem cells taken from patients with neurodegenerative diseases and grow them into an organoid. An organoid is like a mini-brain made in a petri dish – essentially, we can make a semi-replica of someone's brain in a dish.

What is your advice to anyone interested in Biomedical Sciences?

Always be curious, ask questions and be prepared to be wrong from time-to-time – we all are. What’s very important is to align yourself with the best researchers with the best technology who address “think big” – which we have at The University of Melbourne. It’s very important to think big in science and always strive beyond your comfort zone.

How does being situated in the world-leading Melbourne Biomedical Precinct impact your work?

Your environment, team, and resources are the three cornerstones to scientific success. Working in the Melbourne Biomedical Precinct gives you all three. You have world-leading scientists, even Nobel prize winners, in the offices next to you, and there are million-dollar instruments at your fingertips. There are very few places in the world, never mind Australia, that have such scientific muscle.

What’s your favourite pursuit outside work?

I’m a keen guitarist and I play in several bands, one of which is a heavy metal band. I started playing guitar when I was nine-years-old and have played nearly every day. I love how anything is possible, and you can be creative. You always find time for the things you love, whether that be an hour in the morning or the middle of the night. Having a hobby distinct from work is very important. Many times in my career this has given me a perspective on my work that I just couldn’t see. Music and science are very similar processes; they have rules and structures, but you have to use the principle differently to make something original. Just like there is no truly original music there, it’s also not truly original science. We have to use the work of people that have come before us to develop something new. Science is actually a highly creative profession – I would argue the most creative. It is much more than just pipetting liquid into a dish or placing Petri dishes into incubators.

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Meet Associate Professor Kelly Smith

Laboratory Head, Department of Anatomy and Physiology

What area of research are you interested in? 

I am a researcher and Laboratory Head in the Department of Anatomy and Physiology. My lab is interested in discovering new genes required for cardiac development.

What was the driving factor to becoming a biomedical scientist? 

I always followed what I enjoyed and what interested me. I enjoyed biology, but it seemed descriptive, a bit difficult to form rules for. Then I took a subject in genetics and it synthesised both the beautiful complexity of biology with clear rules encoded in our genome.

Is there such a thing as a traditional pathway to where you are now? 

Yes. I took that path: Undergraduate degree in science > Biomed, Honours > PhD > Overseas Postdoc > Return to Australia and then progression to Lab Head. There are other ways, but that’s the route I took.

Explain the background to your research and your main findings so far? 

We know that 99 per cent of the time that a human is born, they make a heart that is almost identical to everyone else’s. Why? It is because there are genetic blueprints that instruct its development, making sure it is created the same each time. Despite this knowledge, we do not know what these genes are or what they do. What we know is these genes must help the heart to a) make enough cells, b) make the right type of cells, and c) put them together in the right order. My lab is interested in discovering those genes and investigating how they work to make a properly patterned heart.

So far, we have discovered several genes of this nature. There are two that I am particularly proud of – both had never been described before our work. One of those genes is necessary to form cardiac valves that partition the atrial and ventricular chambers. Animals defective for this gene fail to form proper valves and this causes lethality. The other gene is required for the heart to have normal rhythm. Mutant animals develop cardiac arrhythmia and die. We first identified these genes in the zebrafish model. We have made mouse models and they have similar defects to the zebrafish. We are also getting emerging evidence that these genes may be mutated in cardiovascular disease.

^{Image: A two-day-old zebrafish embryo}

What impact do you hope your research will ultimately have on improving quality of life? 

Two major things:

• I hope it helps with diagnosis of disease. The diseases I am researching usually affect newborn babies. The guilt a parent experiences in response to this is immense: “What have I done wrong?” “Is it something I ate?” “Is it something I did?” “If I have another child, would they also be affected?” These questions create so much heartache and there is nothing the parent could have done. So much blame can be alleviated when a parent is presented with a diagnosis. Further, prognosis and treatment strategies may be possible, if the cause of disease is known, helping with treatment and/or expectation management.

• I hope my research builds our basic knowledge of how genes function in cells. I hope for this fundamental improvement in our understanding because it won’t affect just cardiac research, but it will also have a bigger impact on other tissues, organs and diseases. It is impossible to predict what impact fundamental discovery research will have, but we do know that building basic knowledge helps many different and, sometimes, unexpected areas of research. I hope my research has such an impact.

Explain the advances in technology that are changing the way this area of research is conducted? 

Genome editing methods, such as CRISPR-Cas9, have made the generation of genetic models simple, targetable and efficient. Advances in genomic sequencing approaches have made possible rapid identification of genetic mutations, accelerating our research by years – or even decades. Other advances in sequencing methods have made it possible to examine gene expression at single cell resolution. And advances in microscopy has allowed for subcellular or even molecule-level imaging to observe biological signalling as it is occurring.

What are the cutting-edge facilities at SBS that help you break new territory?

We have a brand new state-of-the-art zebrafish aquarium for housing and researching thousands of individual families of zebrafish strains. Equipped with microinjection apparatus, and brightfield and fluorescent microscopes to screen zebrafish embryos, as well as fluorescent transgenic reporter fish. We also have excellent microscopes for the imaging of our animals models. We can image at the molecular level up to entire animals and create 3D images of hearts and embryos and create high-speed movies to image the beating heart.

What is your advice to anyone interested in Biomedical Sciences?

Find a compelling question in something you love. There are disappointments and set-backs you hit, there are difficult experiments, late nights, and repetitive elements that the work can demand at times. That is all completely manageable, even exciting, if you love what you do and can see the big picture. If that isn’t there, switch topics until you find it. Embrace flexibility to change and try new things. But stick with something once you believe in it and love it.

How does being situated in the world-leading Melbourne Biomedical Precinct impact your work? 

It is impossible to measure. I am surrounded by such diverse methods and expertise that there is almost no barrier to anything I want to do! There is always an expert to help explain or provide advice on a problem so that missteps are avoided, and there is always a piece of equipment or facility available to do what I want to do. It is an incredibly exciting place to do research.

Who are you collaborating with?

I collaborate with researchers from around the world, Australia and Melbourne Biomedical Precinct. Internationally, I am currently collaborating with researchers from the USA (Harvard University and a consultant from Minnesota), the UK (Oxford University), and the Netherlands (Hubrecht Institute). Nationally, I am collaborating with researchers from Sydney (Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, the Centenary) and Queensland (The University of Queensland). Around the precinct I am collaborating with researchers from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and within the Department.

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