MIPS scientists awarded more than $10 million in NHMRC Investigator Grants

L-R: Professor Mark Febbraio, Associate Professor David Thal, Professor Arthur Christopoulos, Dr Amandeep Kaur and Dr Jason (Jianjun) Cao.

24 February 2025

Research projects to improve treatments in obesity, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s Disease and cancer are among the successful projects from the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), to receive a total of $10,145,035 in National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator funding.

Announced by Federal Minister for Health and Ageing The Hon Mark Butler MP, the NHMRC Investigator Grants support the highest-performing researchers from all career stages to conduct research across four pillars - biomedical, clinical, public health and health services.

Over $67 million has been awarded to 36 Monash researchers from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.

Professor Mike Ryan, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) and Senior Vice President said: “Monash researchers are at the very forefront of addressing medical and health challenges and these NHMRC Investigator grants will lead to further critical breakthroughs that will improve the lives of communities here and around the world. My warmest congratulations to all 36 awardees,"

Director of MIPS, Professor Chris Porter, welcomed the funding and said the projects all aim to address unmet medical needs, with a particularly strong focus on metabolic and neurological diseases - both of which are key therapeutic areas for MIPS.

“On behalf of MIPS I would like to extend my warm congratulations to the successful NHMRC recipients. Their projects truly reflect the innovative and creative research required to advance new knowledge and outcomes, playing a pivotal role in working toward the next generation of medicines” Professor Porter said.

The five MIPS researchers to receive funding are:

Professor Mark Febbraio: Awarded $3 million
Obesity can lead to many diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. In contrast, regular exercise can prevent or slow the progress of these diseases. To date, we do not know the precise ways obesity or exercise affects either the progression or prevention of these diseases. This research program will attempt to better understand what obesity and exercise do to the body, so that we can develop new and better drugs to treat diseases associated with obesity.

Associate Professor David Thal: Awarded $2.8 million
Drug discovery research is plagued by high failure rates. Targeting allosteric sites on proteins offers a new approach to drug discovery. However, allosteric sites are more difficult to investigate because they can be located anywhere on a protein. This project aims to explore how different types of drug-like molecules interact with cell proteins to regulate their function. The outcomes of this research will inform future academic and industrial drug discovery programs.

Professor Arthur Christopoulos: Awarded $2 million
Schizophrenia (SCZ) and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are major global health burdens that share the common feature of poorly treated memory impairment. This project focuses on a specific family of brain receptor proteins that are well validated in the control of cognition. I will leverage groundbreaking discoveries that I have made of novel binding sites on these proteins to overcome current medicinal limitations to yield more targeted, safer and efficacious medicines to treat SCZ and AD.

Dr Amandeep Kaur: Awarded $1.6 million
Proteins are the backbone of the biological world. As we age, some proteins misfold and accumulate in the brain causing devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease. The fine details of how and why this happens are unknown. I plan to develop molecules that will allow us to 1) detect the identity and 2) see the molecular-level details of the misfolded proteins to unravel some of these mysteries. This research could lead to better diagnostics and effective treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease.

Dr Jason (Jianjun) Cao: Awarded $688k
Inhibition of Adrenomedullin (AM) signalling has emerged as a promising therapeutic strategy to suppress solid tumor development and metastasis. However, AM acts through two receptors, AM1R and AM2R that differentially influence tumor pathogenesis and cardiovascular physiology. My research is to develop molecules that can discriminate between two AM receptors, advancing the understanding of AM physiology and offering broader insights for clinical therapeutic development for cancer treatment.

To learn more about the full list of recipients visit Monash News.

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