Research teams led by The Kids Research Institute Australia have been awarded $3.75 million to support two innovative projects – one focused on pioneering a national ‘Food Atlas’ to map access to healthy and unhealthy food across the country, and the other on developing new ways to prevent Strep throat and rheumatic heart disease (RHD).
Announced today by Health Minister Mark Butler, the two grants are part of $268 million in funding awarded to 232 researchers nationally under the latest round of the National Health and Medical Research Council’s Ideas Grants program.
Ideas Grants are intended to support innovative and creative research projects addressing specific questions across any area of health and medical research, from discovery to implementation, for the improvement of health for all Australians.
They are targeted at researchers at all career stages, but provide particular opportunities for early- and mid-career researchers to advance within their field.
Australia-first Food Atlas to support healthier food environments
Dr Gina Trapp, Head of Food and Nutrition Research at The Kids Research Institute Australia and ARC DECRA Fellow at The University of Western Australia (UWA), will lead a team of researchers in a five-year project which will be the first to comprehensively map, measure and monitor access to healthy and unhealthy food access across the country – creating a national ‘Food Atlas’ that can inform policy and planning decisions.
“Having reliable access to affordable, nutritious and safe food is fundamental to general health and wellbeing, growth, development and the prevention of disease and disability throughout the life span,” Dr Trapp said.
However, many communities lack access to healthy food retailers and are oversaturated with fast-food restaurants, liquor stores and other sources of inexpensive, processed food with little or no nutritional value.
“There is now growing acceptance of the need for health and planning interventions that increase the availability and accessibility of heathy foods and decrease the availability of unhealthy foods, yet processionals in food policy, public health and planning roles lack easy access to evidence-based information to inform and support the design of heathy food environments.”
The Food Atlas will spatially visualise a community’s ability to access food, identifying the people and places with limited access to healthy food and/or an overabundance of unhealthy food.
“This data can then be used to inform food and nutrition policy and surveillance, and support planning decisions and future policy direction to create equitable, health-promoting communities that foster healthy eating,” Dr Trapp said.
The grant will be administered through UWA, with the project including researchers from The Kids Research Institute Australia, UWA, Curtin University, Deakin University and the Queensland University of Technology.
Harnessing natural immunity to fight RHD
Research microbiologist Dr Janessa Pickering – who is Senior Research Officer with the Wesfarmers Centre for Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at The Kids Research Institute Australia – will lead a three-year project which seeks to develop new vaccine approaches to prevent Strep throat and Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD).
Strep A is a bacterium that commonly causes sore throats. This primary infection can lead to the development of Acute Rheumatic Fever (ARF) and RHD – an autoimmune condition that kills more than half a million people globally every year.
“In remote Australia and endemic populations globally, there is a disproportionate and overwhelming burden of Strep A infections,” Dr Pickering said.
Preventing sore throats remains critically important to reducing this burden of heart disease.
In this project, the team will use specimens collected from people involved in surveillance studies in remote Western Australia and The Gambia in West Africa to investigate how natural immunity to Strep A could be harnessed to prevent infection and subsequent disease.
Professor Thushan de Silva and Dr Alex Keeley, who lead the study team at the Medical Research Unit The Gambia at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, will work closely with Dr Pickering and Dr Alma Fulurija, also from The Kids Research Institute Australia, to enhance discovery across the different populations.
The surveillance studies have previously identified three types of participants: those with no Strep A infection in the skin or throat; those with one infection and a long period of protection from another infection; and those with repeated infections.
“We hypothesise that natural mechanisms of protection prevent individuals from being infected with Strep A, and these mechanisms can be exploited for new therapies and treatments,” Dr Pickering said.
“By comparing clinical specimens from individuals belonging to each group, we have a unique opportunity to identify new ways to prevent repeated Strep A infections and the development of RHD.”
The findings are expected to help researchers develop new vaccine approaches to prevent Strep throat and Rheumatic Heart Disease.
“Interrupting the causal pathway of RHD has the potential to improve health outcomes for thousands of Western Australian children, and millions of people globally,” Dr Pickering said.
The grant will be administered through UWA.
For more information on this round of NHMRC Ideas Grants, see the Minister’s media release here.