Home
 
   Health
 Aging
 Asian Health
 Events
 Fitness
 Food & Nutrition
 Happiness
 Men's Health
 Mental Health
 Occupational Health
 Parenting
 Public Health
 Sleep Hygiene
 Women's Health
 
   Healthcare
 Africa
 Australia
 Canada Healthcare
 China Healthcare
 India Healthcare
 New Zealand
 South Africa
 UK
 USA
 World Healthcare
 
 Latest Research
 Aging
 Alternative Medicine
 Anaethesia
 Biochemistry
 Biotechnology
 Cancer
 Cardiology
 Clinical Trials
 Cytology
 Dental
 Dermatology
 Embryology
 Endocrinology
 ENT
 Environment
 Epidemiology
 Gastroenterology
 Genetics
 Gynaecology
 Haematology
 Immunology
 Infectious Diseases
 Medicine
 Metabolism
 Microbiology
 Musculoskeletal
 Nephrology
 Neurosciences
 Obstetrics
 Ophthalmology
 Orthopedics
 Paediatrics
 Pathology
 Pharmacology
 Physiology
 Physiotherapy
 Psychiatry
 Radiology
 Rheumatology
 Sports Medicine
 Surgery
 Toxicology
 Urology
 
   Medical News
 Awards & Prizes
 Epidemics
 Launch
 Opinion
 Professionals
 
   Special Topics
 Ethics
 Euthanasia
 Evolution
 Feature
 Odd Medical News
 Climate

Last Updated: Sep 15, 2017 - 4:49:58 AM
Research Article
Latest Research Channel

subscribe to Latest Research newsletter
Latest Research

   EMAIL   |   PRINT

Professor Vanessa Hayes awarded for exceptional Africa-related work


Jul 29, 2013 - 4:00:00 AM

 

Professor Vanessa Hayes received a Celebration of African Australians Inc Award at Parliament House on Saturday.

The awards recognised exceptional achievements and remarkable contributions to Australia, Africa and the world through education, science, research, philanthropy, leadership and community engagement by African Australians.

Professor Hayes heads the Human Comparative Genomics Team at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, while also holding a position as Professor of Genomic Medicine at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, California.

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Hayes made Sydney and Australia home in 2003, becoming a citizen in 2006. She was recognized on Saturday for both her contributions to Africa and Australia.

Hayes made headline news in 2010 when she led the team that generated the first complete personalised human DNA sequences (human genomes) for Africa, namely South African and Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and !Gubi, a Kalahari Bushman from Namibia, and again in 2011 when she co-led a project to generate the complete genome and facial tumour genome of Australia's Tasmanian devil.

At Garvan, she will be using her understanding of the complexities of the Human Genome to drive research focused on identifying the inherited and acquired genetic events that cause prostate cancer.

Generating not only the first human genome for an Australian researcher, the information gained from the African project provided for the first time a true glimpse into the extent of human diversity within Africa. The African genomes (particularly that of Archbishop Tutu) are providing the framework for disease studies and drug development tailored for Africa.

After completing her PhD in the Netherlands in 1999, Hayes returned to South Africa to head a research team that focused on determining genetic susceptibility to HIV infection and disease progression. She became frustrated, realising that the anti-HIV drugs were completely ineffective for Africans.

At the time there were over 5 million orphans in Southern Africa as a result of HIV. Drug development was being driven out of the United States and Europe and therefore tailored to the majority population, including a deletion within the CCR5 gene only carried by people of European ancestry. This genetic target was absent in African ancestral South Africans, said Professor Hayes.

One of the biggest issues with not including all indigenous people in genomics is that medicines tailored towards genomic profiling only target anomalies that can be found in current databases. If there are no African genomes in the database, then Africans are excluded from drug development.

All modern humans shared a common ancestor roughly 200 thousand years ago in Africa. The closer a population resides to our early beginnings, the more diversity is carried in the DNA of that population.

To date Hayes has identified the most diverse human genomes within the Southern African Bushman (Khoesan) peoples. In contrast, Europeans and Asians show the least genomic diversity, having gone through a major 'bottleneck' (population reduction) when leaving Africa some 35,000 to 25,000 years ago.

We found more genetic diversity between two click-speaking Bushmen, who live 500 km from each other, than between me (a red haired) and someone from China, explained Hayes.

By sequencing the complete genomes of !Gubi and the Archbishop we were able to add 1.3 million gene variants to the databases that weren't there previously -- simply because people hadn't looked in Africa.

Hayes believes that Africa holds many secrets to understanding human disease that have not been tapped. For example the significant link to prostate cancer and aggressive prostate cancer disease observed in men of African ancestry. Although the Archbishop has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, our current knowledge was unable to predict his disease status based on his DNA sequence, says Hayes.

Among her current projects, Professor Hayes is studying African men from rural areas with aggressive prostate cancer who, unlike Australian men, have not been impacted by western trends in prostate cancer management. She is using this unique resource as a comparative analysis to better understand both the environmental and genetic factors driving prostate cancer within Australia.


Subscribe to Latest Research Newsletter

Enter your email address:


 Feedback
For any corrections of factual information, to contact the editors or to send any medical news or health news press releases, use feedback form

Top of Page

 
Contact us

RxPG Online

Nerve

Online ACLS Certification

 

    Full Text RSS

© All rights reserved by RxPG Medical Solutions Private Limited (India)