NEW YORK – Australia's Colonial Foundation has committed A$21 million (US$14.4 million) to fund a new research center that will use spatial omics to help diagnose inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.
The funding, announced on Monday, will help establish the Colonial Foundation Diagnostics Centre, led by the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI). The center will combine the RMH's clinical capabilities with WEHI's suite of spatial biology technologies to enable precision medicine and improve patient outcomes. The center also plans to discover new biomarkers of disease.
"Cutting-edge spatial biology technologies allow us to understand diseases at unprecedented resolution [and] make fundamental discoveries directly from patient samples," WEHI Director Ken Smith said in a statement, adding that they "can equip doctors with the information they need to make the best diagnosis."
The new center will build on the Colonial Foundation Healthy Ageing Centre, established by WEHI, RMH, and the Colonial Foundation in 2019.
“We have a bold vision to develop new kinds of diagnostic tests to detect common inflammatory diseases and dementia, and even to determine which patients are most at risk of organ transplant rejection," Colonial Foundation CEO André Carstens said in a statement. "It's our hope these tests will revolutionize how these conditions are detected and treated."