Sydney researcher receives prestigious award from Royal Society of Chemistry

The Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) has awarded the inaugural Outstanding Paper Award to Associate Professor Wojciech Chrzanowski for his 2018 paper, co-authored by Dr Sally Yunsun Kim (University of Sydney PhD graduate), on extracellular vesicles.

"It is enormous recognition of our work and confirmation that our thought-leading research has a global reach and global impact,

"It further confirmed the value of developing ‘pockets of excellence’ in research capabilities, such as nano-bio-characterisation facilities at Sydney School of Pharmacy that offer exceptional opportunity to conduct frontier research and to train the next generation of experts," Associate Professor Chrzanowski says.

"The Royal Society of Chemistry is one of the world's largest and most prestigious publishers/research organisations and this prize will raise awareness for our work and strengthen its global reach."

Associate Professor Wojciech Chrzanowski's research explores cell communication and how our cells can send 'packaged messages' to each other called extracellular vesicles (EVs).

"By ‘decoding’ the EV-messages and understanding how cells selected and packaged specific cargos, my laboratory harnesses the science of this ‘cellular language’ and develops the next generation of EV-based medicines and diagnostic tools for early disease detection," says Associate Professor Chrzanowski.

The implications of this include early warnings about cancers, dementia and kidney disease, as well as active tissue repair.

Recent findings

Associate Professor Chrzanowski's team have made substantial progress in developing and validating isolation protocols for EVs that are pivotal for future translational work.

"We also made a leap forward in the characterisation of EVs and we identified subpopulations of EVs which were not previously described due to limited resolution of conventional research tools. These subpopulations of EVs show great therapeutic potential and add enormously to the fundamental understating of intracellular communication – essential to develop EV-medicines and diagnostics," says Associate Professor Chrzanowski.

The future of EV research

"This year we are focusing on commercialisation of two main technologies that are the central thrust of my research program: diagnostic assays for early disease detection and EV-medicines for treatment of incurable lung injuries/disease."

Associate Professor Chrzanowski and his team will be presenting their work at the following conferences in 2019:

• International Summit of Minimally Invasive and Noninvasive Medicine
• International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies (ICMAT)
• Asian Federation for Pharmaceutical Sciences AFP 2019
• International Conference on Biomedical Engineering (ICBME 2019)
• Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society – Asia Pacific (TERMIS-AP + ABMC7 2019 Congress)