Category: Our Impact

As one of 11 researchers awarded a 12-month WAHTN Early Career Fellowship in Translational Health Research, Dr Janessa Pickering successfully developed tools and protocols to accurately assess Strep A surveillance.

In her Fellowship project, “Developing laboratory diagnostics for Strep A carriage: an essential step to progress vaccine and acute rheumatic fever primary prevention”, Dr Pickering (in collaboration with A/Prof Asha Bowen, Prof Jonathan Carapetis, A/Prof Catherine Satzke and Prof Andrew Steer) determined the optimal way to store and handle throat swabs collected from children. Their new methods can be applied in low- and high-resource settings to measure the rates of Strep A infection and the impact of preventative measures including health policies and vaccinations. This study also discovered how best to disrupt Strep A cell walls, leading to optimised DNA extraction protocols which are now being used in surveillance studies in Australia. Based on the success of the project, Dr Pickering’s colleague A/Prof Asha Bowen adopted the methodology to determine the prevalence and incidence of Strep A in the cohort study she leads in the Kimberley. With the laboratory platform to culture Strep A in place, the Missing Piece surveillance study accurately quantifies the burden of Strep A in school children.

Additionally, the finalisation of research protocols for Strep A identification has led Dr Pickering to a new collaboration with the Australian Strep A Vaccine Initiative Surveillance (ASAVI) – an Australian-led initiative to progress Strep A vaccine development incorporating official partnerships between the Telethon Kids Institute, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation.  ASAVI is funded by the Medical Research Futures Fund and philanthropic donors’ – including Open Philanthropy and the Leducq Foundation. Dr Pickering developed the microbial analysis protocols for the STAMPS urban pharyngitis surveillance study which will provide essential baseline epidemiology data to inform future ASAVI-led vaccine trials.

“This Translation Fellowship has significantly enabled the development of my early career research program which is now embedded within the END RHD Program at the Telethon Kids Institute,” Dr Pickering said. “The funding has been invaluable for establishing Strep A laboratory research, allowing me to develop laboratory expertise and collaborations, and carry out research to high quality.”

Following on from her success in the WAHTN Early Career Fellowship, Dr Pickering received a HOT NORTH Early Career Fellowship for 2020. Combined with the experience and mentoring she gained from her WAHTN Fellowship, she said this placed her in an excellent position to apply for future research funding and continue to work on reducing the burden of Strep A disease. Dr Pickering is now a deputy lead of the Group A Streptococcus Pathogenesis and Diagnostics team, which sits within the END RHD Program at the Telethon Kids Institute.

Dr Janessa Pickering can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter and at the Telethon Kids Institute

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WAHTN Media and Communications  – Hannah Vu (08 6151 0919)

Over its first five years, WAHTN distributed more than $3.85 million from the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) to Early Career Fellowships and Health Service Translation Projects in Western Australia. In this series, we catch up with funding recipients to find out what they achieved and where it’s led them.

As one of the 12 HSTRP recipients in 2019, Dr Wei-Sen Lam of the WA Country Health Service (WACHS) aimed to provide a solution to tackle the lack of clinical trials in rural areas through his project, “Teletrials in WA: A feasibility study to develop and pilot a TeleTrial framework to bring clinical trials closer to home for country patients”.

Dr Lam is the director for TeleTrials at WACHS and Head of Service of the medical oncology department at Fiona Stanley Hospital (FSH). He was the former Director of Medical Oncology at WACHS prior to his role in TeleTrials. He has been a principal investigator for several lung cancer trials and is an executive committee member of the Clinical Oncology Society of Australia (COSA) Rural and Regional Council. Dr Lam shared “As a medical oncologist, I have seen patients live longer with drugs available through clinical trials. Unfortunately for country patients, it is harder for such patients to have access to clinical trials due to travel commitments and time away from home. That’s why we wanted to address this issue through our research”.

COSA developed an Australasian Tele-Trial Model (ATM) which outlines a number of key considerations for using telehealth to increase access to clinical trials for people with cancer in rural and remote locations. This model provides an opportunity to overcome disparities in cancer survival and mortality rates between country patients and their metropolitan counterparts; it is estimated that 67 lives could be saved each year if country WA was to reduce cancer death rates to the metropolitan average.

With the support of WAHTN grant, Dr Lam’s project developed a framework and identified barriers for the implementation of TeleTrials in WA. The project engaged key stakeholders including WA Department of Health, South Metro Health Service, and Great Southern Health Service.

This project was the first step towards developing a pilot TeleTrial in Albany. The WAHTN grant allowed Dr Lam and his TeleTrial team to collaborate with states and territories to improve regional and rural access to clinical trials. The Australian TeleTrial Program, led by Department of Health, Queensland, helped secure $75.2 million in funding from a Commonwealth MRFF Grant in 2020 to run clinical trials using the TeleTrial model. A proportion of this funding will help Western Australia develop a Regional Clinical Trial Coordinating Centre (RCCC) and regional satellite sites to allow greater access to clinical trials.

“Without the WAHTN funding, we would not be able to assess the barriers to develop TeleTrials in Western Australia. We would also not be able to be involved with the Australian TeleTrials Program. I am excited with the next phase of this project and through TeleTrials, regional patients will have greater access to novel treatments and approaches to care” Dr Wei-Sen Lam said.

In the second half of 2022, Dr. Lam and his team will be commencing TeleTrials which allow regional and remote patients access to novel therapies and investigations.

Dr Wei-Sen Lam can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter

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WAHTN Media and Communications  – Hannah Vu (08 6151 0919)