I'm Laura Jayes. I'm going to take you on a tour of the
Institute's Innovation Centre to showcase the incredible work
that's continued unabated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You'll see the Institute's scientists creating stem cells
to shed light on a deadly heart disease and hear how they're
hoping to prevent sudden cardiac arrest.
PROF JAMIE VANDENBURG: This work has been affected by the pandemic but we've learned
to adapt and we've learned to cope and things have been
probably as productive as they can be. We're focusing on
trying to analyse all the possible genetic variants that
occur in these genes that we know drastically increase your
risk of sudden cardiac death. And about one in ten of us is
going to die as a result of a cardiac arrhythmia.
LAURA JAYES: One in 10? Well who is most at risk?
PROF JAMIE VANDENBURG: Anyone with any underlying heart disease is at risk. If your heart is not
perfectly normal then you're at risk. Now fortunately it's not common but
we're talking about say between one and 30 years of age and in
the vast majority of those people they're completely
unaware that there was anything wrong with their heart to start
with and unfortunately if you collapse and have a sudden
cardiac arrest outside the hospital your chances of
surviving are only 1 in 10 so 90% of those people will
never survive, so that's why particularly in that younger
group it's really important that we try and detect those
people before they have that first event. LAURA JAYES: So the SynchroPatch
is of your greatest weapons in identifying and treating genetic heart disease.
PROF JAMIE VANDENBURG: That's right and it literally
has increased our throughput about 100 fold. So in the old
days when we did these experiments we could only do it
one cell at a time. Using this technology we can now load up
cells into these plates and we can study 384 cells all at the same time.
LAURA JAYES: So this machine, can it be said, is it literally a life saver?
PROF JAMIE VANDENBURG: It is, yeah.
It's enabling us to make that definitive genetic diagnosis more quickly and in a much larger proportion of patients.
So it's not just that the odd lucky patient that benefits from our research
conceivably, within the next couple of years, every possible patient around
the world who has any of these variants in these disease genes
we'll be able to help them. LAURA JAYES: The world of genetics
has come a long way since the completion of the human genome
project in 2001. Since then, scientists have analysed
the genes of thousands of people to help identify the
cause of heart disease. The Institute's Dr Monique Bax
is now honing in on the genes of 14 women with SCAD.
DR MONIQUE BAX: So SCAD stands for spontaneous coronary artery dissections and
it's a major cause of heart attacks in pregnant women and women under 50.
LAURA JAYES: And you have 14 women who've donated their blood cells?
DR MONIQUE BAX: Yes. We reprogram the cells taking from blood to stem cells
and tissue culture, and then once we've established those cell lines,
we can bring them to the Hamilton Robotics instrument.
LAURA JAYES: So, this is how you look after those precious stem cells?
DR MONIQUE BAX: Exactly. We're able to use those to make SCAD in a
dish. And that allows us to see if drugs will work, see what
differences there are and really get into why these women
are at risk of having a SCAD heart attack.
LAURA JAYES: Monique, why are you so passionate about your work?
DR MONIQUE BAX: I love being able to do something that helps people. I think you can
make such a big difference and we're very close to a breakthrough.
We've been working really hard to establish these tools that we
can use, using these cell lines, and now we're at the point
where we can start to really delve into the differences and
understand these mechanisms
that underly SCAD heart attacks.