Professor Jeffrey Gorman established the Protein Discovery Centre at QIMR (QPDC) in early 2006 with the overall aim of chemically identifying and analysing proteins involved in physiological and disease processes. It also aims to decipher the ways in which these proteins interact functionally in vivo.

The centre is equipped with an array of the latest high-performance mass spectrometers and other state-of-the-art ancillary equipment, allowing the most up-to-date protein chemistry and proteomics approaches to be applied.

This involves a range of techniques from amino acid sequencing of isolated proteins digested from polyacrylamide gels through to identifying the ways in which the proteins are modified post-translationally to function. This combination of expertise and infrastructure makes the QPDC increasingly able to address important and otherwise intractable biological questions.

One of the QPDC’s main project areas is deciphering viral/host protein interactions, involving a three-year collaboration with Kirsten Spann at the Sir Albert Sakzewski Virus Research Laboratory (SASVRL) at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane and Peter Collins at the National Institutes of Health in the US.

Collins is an experienced virologist and a world authority on paediatric respiratory viruses, and in particular respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). He was the first person to make a recombinant clone of RSV and is currently pursuing gene knockout experiments with the aim of producing a vaccine.

A graduate of the University of Queensland, Spann worked in Collins' lab in the US as a postdoctoral fellow before returning to Australia and setting up her own group in Brisbane, literally just down the road from Gorman.

“It is a very good collaborative network,” Gorman says. “Cell lysates from the gene knockouts experiments come from the US for analysis in Brisbane at SASVRL and QIMR, and it is working really well.”

RSV is a major cause of severe lower respiratory tract infection in infants and serious disease in immunocompromised adults and the elderly. The health care burden due to RSV infection in Australia is considerable – between half and two per cent of children with their first RSV infection require hospitalisation, with most of these kids under six months of age.

Nearly all children will have been infected with the virus by two to three years of age. However, natural infection with RSV does not induce protective immunity, and thus individuals can be infected multiple times even within the same season. Development of an effective and safe RSV vaccine is a high research priority.