The University of Wollongong (UOW) is proud and excited to be associated with the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery (ACMD), a hospital-based biomedical engineering research centre being built at St Vincent’s Melbourne.
Our collaborative research links with St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne stretch back over a decade. The Intelligent Polymer Research Institute’s (IPRI) initial foray into repair of neural systems with Prof Graeme Clark (the Inventor of the Cochlear Bionic Ear) led the foundation for our current involvement in the Mend the Gap project - a global consortium led by the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada to tackle spinal cord regeneration. This initial work also led to a dynamic collaborative program with Prof Mark Cook (neurologist) and his team to develop localised delivery systems to treat epilepsy. These strategies have also been refined to assist in the current Mend the Gap project.
Our collaborations with St Vincent’s expanded to include work with Prof Peter Choong and his team on cartilage regeneration in the knee. This has led to the Axcelda program that recently attracted funding from the MRFF stem cell program to tackle all aspects of translation of this work. Other work with Prof Chris Baker initiated our studies into skin regeneration.
All of these projects have benefitted greatly from researcher exchanges and from the combined training workshops we have held over this period. The interdisciplinary environment and the researcher clinical connections created by the collaboration have enabled significant progress.
Now it is time to take it next level! Over this past decade or so, clinicians, researchers and organisational leaders have joined forces to put forward a vision for an exciting new facility - ACMD.
ACMD is a $206 million global biomedical research and training centre, strategical located on a hospital campus to provide researchers with access to both public and private patients to undertake benchtop to bedside trials. ACMD is a bold initiative to create the first hospital-based, world-class healthtech innovation Centre in Australia. It’s a unique partnership of Australia's best universities, a tertiary hospital, medical research institutes, and a health services provider.
There is now an exciting opportunity to start to plan research projects that can benefit from engagement with the ACMD. There is no doubt it will provide an environment to identify medical challenges to test and refine ideas and to ensure that projects are established in such a way that clinical deployment is realisable.
Please register for a very important webinar on this topic to be held virtually on Friday, November 4 at 2:00pm. To join online, register here.
This is an opportunity too good to miss!