Breakthrough research on regenerating skin-wounds has won Associate Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani, from The University of Queensland (UQ) Centre for Clinical Research, national recognition at the 75th Anniversary Symposium.
The NHMRC Achievement Awards recognise outstanding achievements in health and medical research. These are awarded to the highest scoring applicants in the 2011 peer review of research support and fellowships schemes.
The main focus of Associate Professor Khosrotehrani’s laboratory investigations is on skin-wound healing and particularly how to regenerate skin instead of forming scars by understanding stem cell contributions.
“We believe that this knowledge will be important to understand why some wounds will not heal and why some others will produce excessive scarring,” he said.
“We also aim to use stem cells to improve the healing of skin wounds, which represent a major burden in our society.”
Associate Professor Khosrotehrani said that although skin stem cells have been used routinely for the treatment of wounds, they cannot reconstitute a fully functional skin given the complexity and the many cell types usually involved in wound healing.
“We hope this project will allow us to isolate stem cells from the placenta, a tissue that is currently discarded after each pregnancy”.
“These cells could be used to treat patients with wounds that have a defect in blood vessels. We therefore hope to achieve a better health outcome for our patients”.
Another important aspect of Associate Professor Khosrotehrani’s research is to understand parameters that result in advanced life-threatening skin cancers, mainly melanoma, a major cause of death in Australia.
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