The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is investing almost $6 million to support Australian participation in leading international collaborative research that focuses on health issues that span Australia and the East Asian region.
Today’s investment into globe-spanning health and medical research extends to the NHMRC e-ASIA 2024 Joint Research Program (JRP). The e-ASIA JRP formulates and supports international joint research projects in the East Asia region on a multilateral basis and promotes the interaction of researchers through scientific workshops.
The NHMRC e-ASIA 2024 JRP call supports Australian researchers to collaborate with partners in the East Asian region and allies under 2 funding streams– Health Research on the topic of ‘infectious disease and immunology (including antimicrobial resistance)’ and Food and Health on the topic of ‘personalised nutrition’.
Among the recipients of NHMRC e-ASIA 2024 JRP funding announced today:
University of Wollongong researcher, Associate Professor Guangming Jiang, will build machine learning models to track infectious disease outbreaks, like COVID-19, and guide nonpharmaceutical interventions using wastewater surveillance.
Doctor Megan Crichton from the Queensland University of Technology aims to determine what nutrients and diet patterns are associated with chemotherapy side-effects to identify diet strategies that could help to prevent and manage distressing symptoms like nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhoea, and fatigue.
Associate Professor Toni Velkov from Monash University will lead a project aiming to break the vicious cycle of antimicrobial resistance by harnessing the bacterial killing power of super-phages and combining them with new generation antibiotics to develop novel therapies against deadly infections.
The NHMRC funding provided through the e-ASIA JRP streams will support the Australian component of the collaborative partnership, while the international research partners will be funded by their respective funding agencies.
All funding details can be downloaded on NHMRC’s outcomes of funding rounds webpage.
Quotes attributable to NHMRC CEO, Professor Steve Wesselingh:
- “Australia’s health and medical research sector is world leading, and global collaborations such as those funded today hold great promise to accelerate breakthroughs, develop new treatments and disseminate innovative health and medical interventions.
- “Through multilateral arrangements with our partners, Australian researchers are provided with the opportunity to enhance our national research capacity.
“NHMRC’s participation in the e-ASIA JRP is consistent with our International Engagement Strategy and supports collaborative approaches to global health and medical research.”
