Meet The Researcher

While I was born and raised in Europe (Germany) my two kids were born in North America (Canada) and Australia. Besides making this quite a challenge for family reunions my kids (4 and 7) also recently started to correct my English and French.

In the first instance I wanted to make a difference. As a basic researcher it is often difficult to see where all your work is actually going. Starting to work more translational into MS and working with and for the (mainly Canberra) MS community is the fundamental motivator and driver of my research. The feedback, suggestions and insights I have received over the years have been super valuable. It makes such a difference to know what and whom you are working for.

I am super excited about the prospect of further exploring recovery and remyelination than purely suppressing relapses. Probably because of my biased view as an immunologist, I am also very excited with the emerging interest into innate cell populations which is moving the field away from labelling MS a B and T cell dependent autoimmune condition. I think there is a lot still to understand and it will not be the same for every person with MS but even the prospect of being able to predict a bit better what treatment or therapy could benefit which individual is an exciting thought.

This project is a close collaboration with a small Company called Lipotek. We are using our preclinical models to explore the potential of nanosized vehicle for improved delivery of existing drugs as a way of reducing the dose, changing interaction with the immune system and improving outcome. We can basically pack an already existing and approved treatment into these vehicles. Our preliminary data shows that these vehicles are able to enter the brain and spinal cord basically bringing the drug closer to where it is needed. We are now exploring how low we can go to achieve the same treatment effect and we investigate how these vehicles are working so effectively.

Our research aims to enhance the efficacy of MS treatments. This is highly relevant for people under treatment who have to endure severe side effects. Mitoxantrone for example can only be given for a lifetime total of two years due to its negative effects on the heart. Being able to lower the effective dose will allow people to use this drug for longer. Further, while we are currently working with mitoxantrone as an example and proof of principle, I believe that our work will be able to enhance the delivery of other drugs as well. We are investigating the effects of our nanosized vehicles not only in context of drug efficacy but to further understand how interaction between these particles and the immune system can be exploited to improve patient outcome. Understanding these interactions will further allow us to fine tune these delivery methods.

I enjoy most the unexpected or novel findings. It is absolutely thrilling when you come up with an hypothesis and then look at a result and it changes the way we have seen things. This is when we actually push the border of our knowledge. This moment when the computer spits out the graph or the colour reaction of an assays becomes visible is priceless. It even gets better if you can see the excitement in your students when they are realising that their results mean something. The biggest challenge is to keep up the creativity and the motivation of the team over the often long and tedious troubleshooting and validation periods. And of course, the further you get in your career, the more removed you are from these exciting moments in the lab.