Jake Shortt, a CRCBID-funded PhD student at Peter Mac/University of Melbourne, was one of two recipients of the Albert Baikie Award at the 2011 Haematology Society of Australian and New Zealand Annual Conference in Sydney in November.

The Award recognises the best oral presentation at the meeting by a new investigator.  Congratulations to Jake for this achievement.

Jake has also been advised that his thesis has been formally accepted.  His project focussed on using pre-clinical models of lymphoma and myeloma to develop novel treatment strategies to target pro-survival signalling pathways which are aberrantly activated in cancer cells.  In particular, his work looked at the PI3K/mTOR signalling pathway which represents an emerging therapeutic target in human malignancy.

Jake says, “The CRCBID scholarship allowed me to correlate in vivo responses to kinase inhibitors with functional imaging studies such as FDG-PET.  Not only did this provide an objective measure of lymphoma regressions, but it also provided insight as to the effects of PI3K/mTOR inhibitors on FDG-avidity.  This may be an important consideration, as human lymphoma trials of mTOR inhibitors that are ongoing use FDG-PET as a biomarker of response.”