Two researchers using stem cells to study schizophrenia, degenerative diseases and brain cancer are winners of the 2025 Metcalf Prizes for Stem Cell Research, awarded by the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia today at the Australasian Society of Stem Cell Research Annual Scientific Meeting on the Gold Coast.

Each will receive $60,000 to help further their research. 

A brain bank of schizophrenia to fast-track diagnosis and better treatments

Dr Maria Di Biase has created a ‘brain bank’ of schizophrenia: blobs of brain cells from 100 people growing in the lab.  She’s using these brain organoids to develop urgently needed new approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

Each case is different, so it can often take years to establish stable treatment. And the treatments can have life-changing side effects above and beyond the impact of the illness.

Maria and her team at The University of Melbourne have successfully taken blood from patients and persuaded blood cells to turn into stem cells and then grow into brain cells. She can then study each person’s unique schizophrenia using these blobs of human brain tissue.

Her vision is to use a schizophrenia patient’s own cells to choose the right treatment the first time.

Read more about Maria and her research.

The stem cells in your brain are sleeping until they’re needed

Dr Lachlan Harris says waking brain stem cells at the right time could one day improve cognition and fight neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.

Right now, most of the stem cells in your brain have been hibernating for months or years. Without periods of this sleep-like state, known as ‘quiescence’, they get exhausted and die.

Lachlan, a researcher at QIMR Berghofer in Brisbane, has discovered the molecular mechanisms that control how healthy brain stem cells fall asleep and how they decide when to wake up. Now he is turning his attention to recurrent – and often lethal – brain cancer.

“It turns out that this same process of sleep is adopted by brain cancer stem cells,” Lachlan says. “They’re able to use this dormancy to survive chemotherapy and radiation therapy. After treatment, these cancer sleeper cells can wake up, leading to cancer recurrence.”

“If our ideas are right, it could lead to a whole new way of treating brain cancer, but that's at least 10 years away,” he says.

Read more about Lachlan and his research.

“Maria and Lachlan are conducting fundamental research that will have vitally important implications for mental health, brain cancer and keeping the brain healthy as we age,” 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.

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