Helping animals to take their medicine
Press release
11 August 2009
When it comes to disease in animals, herpesviruses are among the worst, according to Dr Joanne Devlin.
The veterinarian and lecturer in Veterinary Public Health and Epidemiology at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Veterinary Science is on a mission to learn more about the viruses in a bid to develop new vaccines to protect and control them in mammals and birds.
She is one of six young Victorian scientists to win a prestigious 2009 Victoria Fellowship. She received the Fellowship on Tuesday 28 July at a gala function at Government House from the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser, AC.
The Victoria Fellowships, each worth $18,000, were first awarded by the Victorian Government in 1998 to recognise young researchers with leadership potential and to enhance their future careers, while developing new ideas which could offer commercial benefit to Victoria.
To date, much of her work has focused on a contagious respiratory disease in poultry, known as laryngotracheitis virus. She has identified a viral protein (glycoprotein G) that is critical for this herpesvirus to cause disease.
Dr Devlin will use her fellowship to work at the Institute for Animal Health in the United Kingdom to learn more about how glycoprotein G interacts with the immune system of birds. She hopes that the fellowship will help achieve a better understanding of how herpesviruses cause disease in their hosts. This knowledge will be used to develop a new generation of vaccines to control disease in a wide range of animal species, including animals in our economically important poultry and equine industries.
To complement the Victoria Fellowship, Dr Devlin also received a $5000 grant from the Australian-French Association for Science and Technology (AFAS) and the Forum for European-Australian Science & Technology Cooperation (FEAST). The grant is awarded to three Victoria Fellowship winners whose research features an environmental element.
Dr Devlin will use her AFAS-FEAST France Fellowship to extend her study mission with a visit to researchers at l’Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in France. The Virus, Innate Immunity and Signalling team at INRA use specialised molecular techniques to investigate virus-host interactions—techniques which Dr Devlin hopes to establish in the Faculty of Veterinary Science microbiology laboratory to advance her studies of glycoprotein G.
The Victoria Fellowship will help Dr Devlin build on her suite of research, which has resulted in a new vaccine to control disease caused by ILTV in poultry. Her research findings have been published in leading international science journals.
Dr. Devlin graduated with a Bachelor of Veterinary Science (Honours) from the University of Sydney in 2001 and worked in private veterinary practice in Victoria before completing a PhD in microbiology at the University of Melbourne. As well as lecturing, she is an Australian Research Council post-doctoral research fellow.
For further information please contact Hinalei Johnston, Marketing Manager, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Melbourne, Tel: 8344 7844 or email: h.johnston@unimelb.edu.au