Head of Division
Professor Wayne Thomas BSc Hons PhD

Professor Thomas currently holds a Professorship at the University of Western Australia and is a Senior Principal Research Fellow, NHMRC. He has been division head since 1990. He has previously worked at the Medical Research Council, Clinical Research Centre London and at Walter and Eliza Institute for Medical Research. He is a member and past chairman of the International Allergen Nomenclature Committee.

Divisional Summary
Research in the Division of Molecular Biotechnology encompasses studies on the mechanisms of allergy and the development of methods to treat or prevent diseases resulting from these processes.

Advances in medical research are highly dependent on having the right tools for the job. An outstanding problem which encompasses most of work of the Division of Molecular Biotechnology is to determine how immune responses to allergens and other inhaled lead the development of allergy and asthma. While fundamental immunology continues to define the important elements and pathological consequences of activating the immune system most of these result from interactions of receptors with specific antigens and are highly dependent on the doses of the antigens and the context in which they are presented. It is therefore not surprising that studies undertaken with the undefined extracts of allergen sources have produced a myriad of results with little agreement between investigators and little potential for knowledge-based interpretations. The essence of the work of Molecular Biotechnology has been to tackle this disconnect by incorporating both the production of defined allergens and antigens and their use for immunological investigation within the one research group.
The specific research areas have concentrated on 1) determining the immune responses to allergens with varying potency and from different sources to elucidate the differences between responses that lead to allergy and responses that do not, 2) the development of improved immunotherapy with molecularly defined allergens and molecularly engineered derivatives of allergens, and 3) the study of other mucosal immune responses that could influence asthma pathogenesis, especially to microbial antigens.
House dust mite allergy has remained the main focus since it is the most important cause of allergy worldwide and is especially dominant in Australia. New methods of immunotherapy with adjuvants are being explored in mice made allergic to the house dust mite allergen homologue papain. Allergy to cats is being studied because it has been revealed that although the final outcome is an immediate hypersensitivity reaction the sensitisation process is quite different to that of the house dust mite. The study of responses to other mucosal antigens has examined responses to common mucosal colonising bacteria Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae and in mice Pasteurella pneumotropica in combination with papain allergy.

Contact
Email - wayne@ichr.uwa.edu.au
Phone - +61 8 9489 7777
Fax - +61 8 9489 7700