Two researchers using stem cells to study the impact of genetics on mental health and on heart disorders are winners of the 2026 Metcalf Prizes for Stem Cell Research, announced by the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia today.
Each will receive $60,000 to help further their research.
A stem cell village reveals the best treatment for your bipolar disorder
Dr Drew Neavin has developed a stem cell-based method that fast-tracks research identifying how bipolar disorder medications work in different people. This could offer a path to personalised treatment for the 568,000 Australians who have this serious lifelong mental health condition marked by pronounced mood swings.
Drew grows stem cells from scores of different people together in a single dish to work out why a medicine that helps one person fails, or causes harm, in another.
The ‘village-in-a-dish’ technique she helped develop makes large-scale stem cell studies faster and cheaper.
“It could lead to simple tests that tell doctors which drug to prescribe for bipolar disorder and similar conditions, and which patients are at risk of serious side effects,” she says.
Drew is a group leader at The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience.
Read more about Drew and her research.
Beating mini hearts to find cures for inherited heart disease
Dr James McNamara has successfully repaired tiny, beating ‘mini hearts’ grown from the stem cells of patients with genetic heart disease. The work has suggested pathways to identify how faulty genes damage heart muscle, and how to fix them.
Using these mini hearts, he and his colleagues developed a gene therapy that restored heart function in lab-grown human heart tissue and in mice with an inherited heart muscle disease. James plans to develop the therapy to target the root cause of a range of genetic heart diseases.
“There’s the gene variant, then there’s the patient’s disease, and there's a huge pathway between them,” says James, who has just established his own laboratory at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney. “Once we figure out how we get from one to the other, we can develop therapies.”
Read more about James and his research.
“Drew and James are conducting research that is bringing stem cell science and genetics together to improve treatment in the near future for people living with bipolar disorder and those with genetic heart diseases,” says Dr Graeme Blackman AO, the chairman of the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia.
The awards are named for the late Professor Donald Metcalf AC who, over a 50-year career, helped transform blood cancer treatment and transplantation medicine, paving the way for potential stem cell therapy in the treatment of many other conditions.
They will be formally presented on Monday 9 November 2026 at the Australasian Society of Stem Cell Research Annual Scientific Meeting in Melbourne.
To arrange interviews, contact:
Tanya Ha, Science in Public, 0404 083 863, [email protected]
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