Asthma Researcher awarded TSANZ Career Development Fellowship
Dr Adam Collison has been awarded a TSANZ and National Asthma Council Asthma and Airways Career Development Fellowship to explore asthma in pregnancy.
Maternal asthma is a major risk factor for the development of childhood asthma, with the control and severity of asthma during pregnancy associated with the development of asthma in the child.
This fellowship will allow Adam to focus on his valuable research in this area.
“The results of our research are very promising,” Adam says. “We hope that research in this field will lead to a dramatic reduction in the rates of children who develop asthma through monitoring and treating the mother’s asthma during pregnancy.”
Adam anticipates that women whose asthma is better managed during pregnancy will have less chance of giving birth to children at risk of developing the condition.
With a focus on identifying novel therapeutic targets and molecular biomarkers to assist in better identifying and treating asthma, this research aims to address currently unmet clinical needs.
The work is an extension of Adam’s first NHMRC-funded project the “Breathing for Life Trial”, where he collaborates with Dr Vanessa Murphy, Professor Peter Gibson and Professor Joerg Mattes.
“This Fellowship will allow me to conduct some outstanding experiments that will shape our understanding of the development of asthma and may shed light on new prevention strategies,” Adam explains.
Since being awarded his PhD in 2012 Adam has been a post-doctoral researcher with UON and HMRI and is a researcher with the Priority Research Centre GrowUpWell. Adam is enthusiastic about the opportunities for emerging researches such as himself to do world-class medical research in the Hunter.
“Without seed funding from the Hunter Children’s Research Foundation and the PRC GrowUpWell I would not have been in a position to generate the preliminary data to be competitive for such a prestigious fellowship”
Adam has a particular interest in the role of asthma exacerbations and rhinovirus infections during pregnancy and the impact this has on the development of asthma in childhood.
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