Sleeping cancer cells. And a schizophrenia brain bank. Meet the Metcalf Prize winners
I am delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 Metcalf Prizes for Stem Cell Research: Dr Maria Di Biase from The University of Melbourne and Dr Lachlan Harris from Brisbane’s QIMR Berghofer.
Both are conducting important fundamental research using stem cells to study function, development and disorders of the human brain in ways that were once never thought possible. Each will receive a $60,000 prize from the Foundation. More below.
Celebration of the Metcalf Prizes, established in 2014, marked one of the highlights from the Australasian Society of Stem Cell Research Annual Meeting on the Gold Coast, Queensland.
Also this month, building off the work of Maria and Lachlan, we’ve put together a backgrounder on stem cells and the human brain.
Our round-up of stem cell news includes how US researchers have produced human eggs from skin cells; potential use of menstrual blood samples in medical research; lab-grown teeth, and more.
Stem cells sound magical, but they’re not all created equal: we particularly enjoyed this overview in The Conversation by Associate Professor Jennifer Zenker and agree with her that stem cells, when truly mastered, remain ‘one of the most promising frontiers in modern medicine’.
And finally, congratulations to:
- Professor Kaylene Young, one of our inaugural Metcalf Prize winners (2014), for being appointed to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences Mentorship Program;
- Metcalf Prizes alumni Professor Jose Maria Polo (2014) and Professor Enzo Porrello (2018) for being welcomed as Fellows to the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences; and
- Foundation Board member Professor Caroline Gargett, who chairs our science and ethics committee and Metcalf jury, for being awarded the 2025 ASSCR President’s Award for outstanding career achievements and inspiring leadership.
Kind regards,
Dr Graeme L Blackman AO
Chairman, National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia
In this bulletin:
- A brain bank of schizophrenia to fast-track diagnosis and better treatments
- The stem cells in your brain are sleeping until they’re needed
- Unlocking the brain's mysteries
- ASSCR Annual Meeting highlights
- Stem cell news from around the world
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 patients, growing in the lab. She’s using these brain organoids to develop urgently needed new approaches to diagnosis and treatment.
Schizophrenia affects about one in 300 people worldwide. It usually manifests in adolescence. People with schizophrenia lose an average 15 years of lifespan.
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; a vision which will be supported by her $60,000 Metcalf Prize.
Read more about Maria and her research
The stem cells in your brain are sleeping until they’re needed
Waking up brain stem cells at the right time could one day improve cognition and fight neurodegenerative diseases and cancer, according to Dr Lachlan Harris, a researcher at QIMR Berghofer in Brisbane.
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 has discovered the molecular mechanisms that control how healthy brain stem cells fall asleep and how they decide when to wake up.
Now, with the help of his $60,000 Metcalf Prizes from the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia, he’s 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,” says Lachlan. “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.”
Lachlan and his team’s work unravelling brain stem cell quiescence is fundamental research that could one day be applied to keeping the brain healthier as we age and also to future brain cancer treatments.
“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
The Metcalf Prizes for Stem Cell Research are named after the late Professor Donald Metcalf, AC.
Over his 50-year career, Don helped transform blood cancer treatment and transplantation medicine, and paved the way for potential stem cell therapy in the treatment of many other conditions.
Unlocking the brain's mysteries
The brain remains one of the greatest biological mysteries. Often referred to as the body’s ‘control centre’, this complex organ of nervous tissue makes us uniquely who we are: living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings.
Often referred to as the body’s ‘control centre’, this complex organ of nervous tissue makes us uniquely who we are: living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings.
That’s because the brain regulates both conscious and unconscious actions – our thoughts, memories, movement, emotions, behaviour, identity, hunger signals and vital functions like breathing, body temperature and heartbeat.
Despite advances in science, we have much to learn about the brain, how to keep it healthy and better understand what happens to it as we age.
Today, around two in five Australians will experience a brain disorder in their lifetime.
Unfortunately, effective therapies and treatments for a myriad of disorders (neurological and psychiatric) are yet to be discovered.
While stem cell therapy has been routinely used since the 1970s, proven treatments are largely confined to bone marrow and blood stem cell transplants for conditions affecting the blood and immune systems, such as leukaemia and thalassaemia, alongside corneal and skin grafting applications.
In Australia and globally, there are several experimental stem cells therapies being tested for many diseases including Parkinson’s disease, arthritis, macular degeneration, diabetes, heart conditions and more. But they are not yet ready for standard medical care.
Of all organs in the human body, the brain is one of the most challenging to study. It is complex and difficult to access.
In good news, as the winners of our 2025 Metcalf Prizes demonstrate, stem cell research is a game-changer for brain research on multiple fronts:
- Scientists can grow different types of healthy brain and nerve cells from stem cells in the lab to unlock the brain’s mysteries.
- They can engineer advanced models of diseases and disorders, using patient-derived stem cells (from blood and skin) to aid our understanding of these conditions and fast-track development of possible treatment options.
- And they can study stem cells that reside in the adult brain to see if these can be stimulated to produce therapeutic benefits
Australia's 'brains trust' studying the brain
Up until a few decades ago it was widely believed that the brain had neither stem cells nor the ability to regenerate itself.
Queensland Brain Institute founder and pioneering neuroscientist, Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett AO FA [pictured right], overturned this dogma with his discovery of how the brain can be regenerated through stimulating the production of new nerve cells.
Notably, Perry was inspired by Professor Don Metcalf’s work on blood-forming (haemopoietic) stem cells. In 1982, he predicted that there were stem cells in the brain. In 1992 he found them in mouse embryos then in adult mice. A decade later, he isolated them from the forebrain.
Perry’s work has led to a transformation in our understanding of the brain, earning him the 2015 CSL Florey Medal; Research Australia Lifetime Achievement Award; and an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Neuroscientist Professor Kaylene Young – one of two recipients of the Foundation’s inaugural Metcalf Prizes – assisted with the establishment of the Queensland Brain Institute in 2003.
In 2014, she was awarded a Metcalf Prize for her work unravelling the biology and function of brain stem cells in neurodegenerative diseases. The prize included mentoring from Professor Don Metcalf.
Since then, the Theme Leader for Brain Health and Disease Research at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research (University of Tasmania) has run patient trials of a non-invasive treatment for multiple sclerosis using magnetism to stimulate brain repair. Read more
Kaylene also featured on our recent ‘Future Medicine: Stem Cells & Brain Health’ webinar. Watch a recording on the Foundation’s website
Monash University researcher Associate Professor Atul Malhotra is leading a clinical trial to explore feasibility and safety of using donated umbilical cord blood-derived cells to help repair brain injury associated with preterm births.
The phase-1 ALLO trial is backed by a $100,000 Matched Funding Program grant co-funded by the Foundation and Cerebral Palsy Alliance. Read more
In other recent developments:
- Exercise, stem cells and Parkinsons: Professor Clare Parish (The Florey, Melbourne), who also joined our brain health webinar, is leading research with Professor Lachlan Thompson (University of Sydney) on the role of exercise to enhance stem cell transplant function in Parkinson’s disease: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stemcr.2025.102480
- Stopping cells from dying: WEHI scientists, including researchers from the Parkinson’s Disease Research Centre, have discovered how to block cells dying, in a finding that could lead to new treatments for neurodegenerative conditions: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr8146
- Lighting up human brain cells to find new dementia medicines: researchers from the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences have secured a Commonwealth Government-backed $953,751 Medical Research Future Fund grant: https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/monash-scientists-secure-mrff-funding-to-find-new-medicines-for-dementia-by-lighting-up-human-brain-cells
ASSCR meeting showcases how donations make a difference
Each year, the Foundation presents a session at the ASSCR Annual Scientific Meeting to formally present the Metcalf Prize winners and to hear from researchers we’ve backed in the past. In our next newsletter we’ll profile some of these early career researchers supported with the help of our donors.
Separately, thanks to a bequest from the estate of the late Gordon Lapham, the Foundation supports registration and travels costs of a group of PhD students and early career researchers.
This year, 24 researchers [pictured with ASSCR 2025 organising committee members] received grants to attend the meeting on the Gold Coast in Queensland, and present their work.
And finally, the Foundation is proud to sponsor the ASSCR Rising Star Awards, which this year went to Dr Ana Núñez Nescolarde from the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research at the University of Western Australia; and Dr Kevin Law from the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.
Stem cell news from around the world
Between newsletters, we share stem cell news on social media:
Here are a few stories we’ve shared recently:
Our 2025 Metcalf Prize winners made headlines in The Courier-Mail; 7News Melbourne; ABC Radio Melbourne Mornings with Rafael Epstein; and ABC Radio Gold Coast Drive with Bern Young. Listen to their radio interviews on the Foundation’s website: https://www.stemcellfoundation.net.au/listen
ABC News: US researchers turn DNA from human skin cells into ‘functional’ eggs able to be fertilised by sperm in a lab. Paper.
The Conversation: ‘Stem cells sound magical, but they’re not all created equal. Here’s what you need to know’. Article by Associate Professor Jennifer Zenker (Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute, Monash University).
The Guardian: ‘A medical miracle: is period blood the most overlooked opportunity in women’s health?’. Article quotes Professor Caroline Gargett, who discovered endometrial stem cells.
CNN: ‘Scientists are racing to grow human teeth in the lab’. Progress on creating lab-grown teeth, including a recent King’s College London study. Paper.
Fox News: ‘Gray hair could play surprising role in cancer defense, study suggests’. Japanese scientists reveal how pigment-producing stem cells in hair follicles can respond to stress in dramatically different ways. Paper.
Australian Financial Review: ‘How Mesoblast’s founder proved the shorters wrong’. Article on hard work of immunologist-turned-businessman Silviu Itescu and his company’s first commercial product Ryoncil.
Read more stories in our social channels: LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Bluesky and Facebook.
Unacceptably so, according to Monash University researcher, Associate Professor Atul Malhotra, Senior Consultant Neonatologist and Head of Monash Children’s Hospital’s Early Neurodevelopment Clinic.
Dr Felicity Davis won a 2019 Metcalf Prize for her research into 
Dr Rhiannon Werder is growing ‘mini-lungs in a dish’ that mimic the complexity and function of lungs in living people.
Dr William Roman is growing human muscles on a chip. He’s using them to understand how the skeletal muscle cell, the largest cell in a human body, connects with neurons and tendons to create working muscles.
Stem cell scientists have turned their research into works of art in a competition and exhibition to celebrate Global Stem Cell Awareness Day 2024 (October 9).
Two past Metcalf Prize winners – cardiologist and researcher 
University of Technology Sydney biomedical engineer Dr Jiao Jiao Li plans to use stem cells as biofactories to make drugs to reduce inflammation and encourage repair in painful osteoarthritic joints.
Rare but extremely debilitating gut disorders, like paediatric achalasia and Hirschsprung’s disease, can affect the fundamental ability to swallow and digest food and pass stools. Children with these conditions endure a lifetime of potentially life-threatening symptoms that severely impact their daily lives, require repeat hospitalisation, surgery and ongoing care.
Endometriosis, a painful condition caused by the growth of endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus, affects one in nine reproductive age women, half of all infertile women, and more than half of women and teenaged girls with pelvic pain.
Each year we award two $60,000 prizes to support the field’s rising stars and set them up for future success. And it’s working!
Now is the time to apply for grants and submit abstracts.
Human sex characteristics develop in the womb. About one in 100 babies are born with variations, some of which are linked to health problems such as increased cancer risk, heart disease, osteoporosis, intellectual disability, or infertility.
Little Lilly Lloyd-Morgan, aged 8, lives with a debilitating condition which stops her swallowing food. But there is hope on the horizon thanks to a potential stem cell therapy being developed by Dr Lincon Stamp and Dr Marlene Hao at the University of Melbourne.
Lincon and Marlene are developing a therapy that involves making healthy nerve cells from stem cells. These cells would be transplanted into patients like Lilly to replace the damaged or lost nerve cells and restore function.
Grow heart cells together in a petri dish and they know what to do – they start beating. Now they’re being used to find drugs to heal the heart. Eye cells are being grown to test gene therapies for blindness. Human brain cells growing together make connections and can even learn to play Pong! They are also providing a valuable tool to reveal how the brain ages.
Dr Jiao Jiao Li plans to use stem cells as biofactories to make drugs to reduce inflammation and encourage repair in painful osteoarthritic joints.
People diagnosed with late-stage stomach cancer have a less than 10 per cent chance of surviving more than 5 years.
“Australians will pay a lot to relieve the pain of arthritis—sometimes opting for unproven therapies using stem cells.”
Extremely premature babies’ own stem cells could hold the key to a new treatment for brain injury associated with preterm birth.
Dr Anai Gonzalez-Cordero’s research aims to restore sight in people with inherited retinal diseases, by repairing or replacing damaged photoreceptor (light-sensing) cells in the eye.
Dr Ashley Ng is revealing how blood stem cells are controlled, and how they sometime go rogue, leading to blood cancers. He has discovered how a protein known as ‘ERG’ underpins healthy development of blood cells, and how it also plays a role in Down syndrome-associated leukaemia and a range of other blood cancers.
Melbourne researcher Dr Peter Houweling is growing mini-muscles in the lab, in order to study muscular dystrophy in children, without the need for invasive and painful tissue biopsies.
Developmental biologist Dr Sarah Withey is using mini liver ‘organoids’ made from patients’ stem cells to test a potential treatment for children with a rare, genetic, progressive, life-limiting disease – Ataxia Telangiectasia (A-T).
Cardiac stem cell researcher Professor Enzo Porrello, a 2018 Metcalf Prize-winner, will be Director of reNEWS’s Melbourne node.
With your support, the Foundation wants to help fund Gerard’s research and bring this life-changing treatment to clinical trials.
Associate Professor Siok Tey is researching treatments that will improve the survival and quality of life for her patients with leukaemia or other blood cancers.
Dr Pengyi Yang plans to transform stem cell research.
Melbourne university student and long-distance runner Billy Morton, 22, was first diagnosed in his early teens with a rare genetic disease that is causing his eyesight to deteriorate. At the time there was no prospect of a treatment, but progress in gene therapy research is providing new hope.
Billy, with the rare genetic disease choroideremia, is one of 190 million people worldwide with diseases causing the death of light-sensing photoreceptor cells in the eye.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for all Australians. Every year more than 57,000 Australians suffer a heart attack. Many develop heart failure. 
Each year, the Foundation selects up to four promising Australian stem cell research projects that need a funding boost to help them progress new therapies to human clinical trials.
Past
ISCT 2021 took place last week.
Back in Melbourne, Graeme visited Professor Tom Edwards in his lab at the Centre for Eye Research Australia where he is developing 
The Foundation is backing Professor Mark Shackleton’s stem cell research aimed at preventing melanoma and treating vitiligo – two diseases affecting the melanin pigment-producing cells, called melanocytes.
“In essence, there’s two main diseases which arise from melanocytes: one involves having too many melanocytes, which is melanoma, and the other results from not having enough melanocytes, which is vitiligo,” Mark says.
Proteins which control the growth of cells in embryos could teach us how to stop the uncontrolled growth of cells that is the hallmark of cancer, thanks to work by molecular biologist Dr Melanie Eckersley-Maslin.
Clinical haematologist Associate Professor Steven Lane wants to lift the survival rates of his leukaemia patients. He thinks the key could lie in the genetic fingerprints of the blood cancer stem cells that proliferate the disease.
2016 Metcalf Prize winner James Chong kicked off 2020 with a major journal publication on New Year’s Day. His study, published in Science Translational Medicine, showed a new protein therapy could encourage 
US researchers created programmable living machines – dubbed xenobots – by assembling cells from African clawed frogs into robots that can move around on short stumpy legs. These living robots could deliver small amounts of material, such as medicines or useful reagents. 
“Australia’s research workforce will be severely impacted by the pandemic and the effects are likely to be felt for an extended period.”
One such is Professor Ryan Lister (pictured with WA Science Minister Dave Kelly) who, in late September, was named joint 
Frozen cord blood became a vital back-up source of blood-forming stem cells during COVID-19 travel restrictions.
Preclinical results for the MCDS drugs have been encouraging, but if we are to progress the drug to the next phase, and identify other drug candidates, we need to know exactly how it works. 
Associate Professor Mike Doran from Queensland University of Technology is exploring the potential of special cells taken from placentas to repair non-union bone fractures.
We join the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) and International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy (ISCT) in raising concern about the marketing of unproven stem cell therapies to treat people infected with Coronavirus disease (COVID-19).
ISCT 2020 will be accessible remotely and on-demand, including live and recorded sessions that are certified for accreditation programs, in addition to networking events, poster halls, and one-on-one partnering opportunities. 
The ISSCR Annual Meeting brings together scientists, clinicians, business leaders, ethicists, and educators from more than 65 countries.
Stem Cells Australia (SCA), a $24 million-dollar Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative, has formally come to an end. 
SCA will continue as an educational website, administered by the University of Melbourne, providing teaching resources for schools, and reliable information for people making choices about their own health care.
Cardiologist and researcher Associate Professor James Chong has already used human stem cells to repair the damaged hearts of other large primates — a world first. 
Professor Emeritus James A. Angus AO is a biomedical pharmacologist with a strong scientific and leadership background. He was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne from 2003 to 2013.
The Foundation took the opportunity to transition to a different management model. Graeme Mehegan has taken over the day-to-day running in the newly created role of General Manager. He has served the Foundation as Company Secretary and CFO since its inception in 2012.
On 28 November 2018, He Jiankui claimed to a packed conference room at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong to have edited the genomes of two twin girls, Lulu and Nana, who were born in China.
2017 Metcalf Prize winning computational biologist Jessica Mar is analysing stem cells to discover the changes that influence ageing. Who will win the 2018 Prizes?
Your bone marrow makes one million new mature blood cells every second. Your life depends on it!
Cardiac disease affects at least 1.4 million Australians and almost 350,000 will have a heart attack at some point in their life. One in every two people with severe heart failure will die within one year of diagnosis. Stem cells may have the potential to treat heart failure.
These are just some of the things a live audience learnt from six Australian stem cell scientists at the ‘Stem Cell Research—Now and in the Future’ forum—the public event held in the lead up to the ISSCR 2018 Annual Meeting in Melbourne.
The audience heard about the current state of play with research and treatments for eye, skin, heart, kidney and blood disorders. They also had the opportunity to ask the panel their own questions; from what inspired the panellists to become stem cell scientists (with one freaky sci-fi related answer), to the treatment options here and overseas for MS.
On Wednesday 26 June, Melissa received the National Health and Medical Research Council Elizabeth Blackburn Fellowship – Biomedical. The Fellowship is named after 2009 Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn who discovered how chromosomes are protected by telomeres. Melissa was one of 20 of Australia’s finest health and medical researchers honoured at the NHMRC’s annual Research Excellence Awards in Canberra.
