The 2005 Applied Biosystems Edman Award: Andrew Hill

Andrew Hill My research career began in New Zealand where I completed my undergraduate degree as an honours student of Bill Jordan and Geoff Chambers at Victoria University of Wellington, working on the molecular genetics of a sheep disease, facial eczema. After completing my honours year and working the summer in the lab I decided to pursue a PhD overseas. I travelled to the UK where I began working as a research assistant to John Collinge at St Mary's Hospital Medical School who was working on human prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease (CJD). At the time there was much interest in these diseases as the epidemic of BSE ('mad-cow' disease) in the UK posed a threat to public health. I signed up to do a PhD in the same lab and set about examining the biochemical nature of the aberrant, infectious, protein implicated in these diseases. I gained skills in molecular biology and protein chemistry, working mainly in a specialised containment laboratory where things could go in but rarely leave. It was an exciting time to be working in the field; the lab was rapidly expanding and I had finally got my protein expressed and western blots to work. In the beginning of 1996 came the announcement that several young people in the UK had developed a new form of CJD. This made an already hard working lab move up a gear as we all worked on different aspects of this new disease. I began looking at the form of prion protein in these new cases and identified a difference in the prion proteins between vCJD and other human prion diseases. We developed this into the first diagnostic test for this disease, and using transgenic mice, demonstrated that vCJD and BSE were caused by the same strain of infectious agent (the 'prion'). After finishing my PhD, I continued as a post-doc for a couple of years where we made the discovery that subclinical forms of prion disease can exist in animals that carry the disease without showing any clinical symptoms.

I then came to Australia as a Wellcome Trust Prize Travelling Research Fellow joining the group led by Colin Masters in Melbourne, working in Roberto Cappai's lab in the Department of Pathology at the University of Melbourne. Here, I broadened my horizons by working on other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, and extended my range of technical approaches, integrating cellular and biochemical approaches with my molecular biology and protein chemistry background. From here I returned briefly to the UK in 2002, to complete a set of ongoing experiments. Following this, I returned to the University of Melbourne in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, to establish a research group and take up an NHMRC RD Wright Fellowship. In 2005, the lab moved to the Bio21 Molecular Science and Biotechnology Institute where we continue our research into prions and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Previous Page | Top of Page
This page last modified: October 10, 2008.