Lucy Porter - Highest achieving BMedSc(Hons) student
Congratulations to Lucy Porter, BMedSc(Hons) student from the Biomedicine Discovery Institute, on receiving the highest achieving student award in the 2024 BMedSc(Hons) cohort, for her research on Crohn’s Disease.
Crohn’s Disease (CD) is a debilitating inflammatory bowel disease that can affect any region of the gastrointestinal tract, but most commonly affects the small intestine. Despite being the most common subtype of paediatric inflammatory bowel disease, the precise cause of Crohn’s disease is not known. However, disruption to the intestinal epithelial barrier is increasingly recognised as a key feature of paediatric Crohn’s Disease.
In 2024, Lucy Porter, a Monash University medical student, took a year away from her medical degree to undertake research in the BMedSc(Hons) degree, hoping to shed light on the epithelial barrier disruption in paediatric Crohn’s disease.
“I really appreciate how much my confidence in reading and interpreting discovery research articles grew throughout the year. I encourage future students to use the honours year as an opportunity to explore new methods and techniques. It’s also important to choose a project that really excites you as it helps you stay motivated when experiments don't go quite as planned or things feel challenging.”
Lucy completed her Honours year in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology in the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University, under the supervision of Professor Helen Abud, and Dr. Ed Giles, a Paediatric Gastroenterologist at Monash University and Monash Health, and a Research Fellow at Hudson Institute of Medical Research. To better understand the epithelial barrier disruption in Crohn’s disease, Lucy used donated intestinal tissue from healthy patients as well as from patients with paediatric Crohn’s disease. She used cutting edge gene sequencing technologies to identify key markers of barrier disruption in patients. She then used the patients’ tissues to create “stem-cell organoids” to replicate the disease in the laboratory.
“Starting my degree during COVID meant that I had limited laboratory experience before my honours year, so learning how to perform experiments that I’d only heard about in theory was so exciting, although super challenging at first! I also really enjoyed working in a wet lab environment.”
Lucy was then able to use gene sequencing and imaging technologies to demonstrate that she had successfully reproduced the disease in the organoids. She was also able to induce markers of the disease even in the healthy tissue organoids. Now that she has successfully developed these models of the disease, they can be used to identify new treatment targets, and to trial new therapeutic options for Crohn’s disease.
As a result of her final thesis, Lucy was awarded the Highest Achieving BMedSc(Hons) student award and a $1,000 prize, to be presented at the Final Year Medicine Awards Ceremony in December, 2025.
“My honours year really cemented my interest in research and intention to pursue a clinician-scientist career pathway. I am incredibly grateful to my supervisors and the Abud lab members who made my year so enjoyable and have left me feeling excited about hopefully pursuing a PhD in the future.”
About Monash University
Monash University is Australia’s largest university with more than 80,000 students. In the 60 years since its foundation, it has developed a reputation for world-leading high-impact research, quality teaching, and inspiring innovation.
With four campuses in Australia and a presence in Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Italy, it is one of the most internationalised Australian universities.
As a leading international medical research university with the largest medical faculty in Australia and integration with leading Australian teaching hospitals, we consistently rank in the top 50 universities worldwide for clinical, pre-clinical and health sciences.
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