A collaborative research program established between the Centre for Drug Discovery Innovation (DDI) and Sydney Precision Data Science Centre aims to advance decision-making in drug discovery enabled by data science. With established strengths in both data science and drug discovery the collaboration is ideally placed to explore how these new context-specific questions from drug discovery will inform methodological developments in data science. Four supplementary scholarships have been made available to support this program with funding from the Faculty of Science and the DDI.
Supplementary scholarships are available for eligible HDR students to work on the projects listed below. Details of the scholarship criteria, terms and conditions, and application form is available on the scholarship’s website.
Project 1
Discrimination of brain protein changes linked to neuropathology vs cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease.
Chief investigator: Associate Professor Eleanor Drumond
While large studies of human Alzheimer’s disease brain proteomics have been performed, it is unclear which brain protein changes are directly linked to cognitive impairment in comparison to those associated with neuropathology. From a drug discovery perspective, it is important to discriminate between these two aspects to determine which drugs have the potential of directly influencing cognitive impairment. This project aims to reanalyse publicly available human brain proteomics data to identify proteins that correlate with cognitive impairment vs those that correlate with beta amyloid and/or tau pathology.
Project 2
Unmask the mYXtery of sex bias in disease and therapy
Chief Investigator: Duan Ni
Female and male differ in disease development and treatment response. For example, females are more prone to develop multiple sclerosis while males have higher incidence of tuberculosis. The underlying causes for such biases seem to be multifaceted, involving differences in lifestyles, hormones and X chromosome. Surprisingly, the role of Y chromosome and its genes, another common difference between female and male, remains elusive.
Here, leveraging unprecedented global health and single cell multi-omic data, we aim to systematically profile the sex bias landscapes in diseases and treatments and delineate the underlying mechanistic roles of Y chromosome in physiology, pathology and therapy.
Project 3
Cross-modal biomarker and therapeutic target discovery in neurodegeneration: anchoring accessible biofluids to central nervous system pathology
Chief Investigator: Professor Adam Walker
This project will use the AMP ALS Knowledge Portal to identify molecular mechanisms and biomarkers of TDP-43-related neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS/MND) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The project will integrate large-scale genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic, clinical, and neuropathology datasets from international cohorts to link molecular changes in the brain and spinal cord with accessible biofluid biomarkers. Using advanced multi-modal data integration and machine learning approaches, the project will identify robust, reproducible disease signatures, improve patient stratification, and prioritise potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets for future clinical and pre-clinical development.
Project 4 – TBC