MRFF Critical Infrastructure funding for integrated medical capability equipped to deliver personalised medicine at scale

^{Photo: Prof Malcolm McConville and A/Prof David Stroud}

The consortium has been awarded $15.83M including funding from the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Fund to set up a human phenotyping platform at Bio21.

The project will establish a fully integrated, high-capacity multi-omics platform for clinical samples providing an end-to-end solution from sample collection to data collection and analysis within a NATA certified quality management system. Prof Malcolm McConville, A/Prof David Stroud and several other researchers from the School of Biomedical Sciences are involved in this initiative, including A/Prof Ben Parker, Dr Daniella Hock, A/Prof Michael Menden, Prof Kaylene Simpson, and Prof Sammy Bedoui.

This exciting initiative brings together over 20 researchers from across MDHS and the Parkville precinct. It will build world-leading capability in precision medicine at the University and advance the development of new diagnostics and treatments for a wide range of acute and chronic diseases.

^{Prof Malcolm McConville}

The platform, termed OMIX3, will be first-in-kind in Australia and will build upon existing state-of-the-art NCRIS-funded infrastructure and expertise, and outstanding collaborative networks of researchers, clinicians and commercial partners around Parkville and beyond.

The OMIX3 platform will provide enormous breadth and applicability to the full spectrum of clinical relevance and will be built with scalability in mind. The ability of the OMIX3 platform to address unmet clinical needs through new discovery and diagnostic capability will be demonstrated through four flagship projects. These include:

• an ambitious inter-generational longitudinal cohort project, Px4 Health to accelerate biomarker identification and causal associations between multi-omics, lifestyle and environmental factors in determinants of disease vs healthy aging;
• aid the identification of children at high risk of severe dental disease.
• the identification of predictive biomarkers for infectious diseases; and
• using ultra-rapid functional multi-omics to increase the diagnostic yield of patients with rare genetic diseases;

This research grant funding is part of the Medical Research Future Fund Critical Infrastructure Initiative including $7M from MRFF and $8.83M co-investment from partners including ThermoFisherScientific, Bioplatforms Australia and University of Melbourne.

Partners and collaborators

Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, ThermoFisher Scientific, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Bio21 Institute, Doherty Institute, Australian BioCommons, Australian Genome Research Facility, Victorian Centre for Functional Genomics, Metabolomics Australia and Bioplatforms Australia.