Bulletin

Issue: July 2004

People

Claude Bernard wins research foundation medal

Eminent Australian neuroimmunologist, Professor Claude Bernard, left, has been awarded this year's Bethlehem Griffiths Research Foundation Medal. Professor Bernard is Director of the Neuroimmunology Laboratory in the School of Molecular Sciences at La Trobe University.

The award was presented in recognition of his outstanding contribution to research into Multiple Sclerosis. Over the years Professor Bernard and his colleagues have made exciting discoveries in this field of research, the latest published in the international science journal, Nature Neuroscience.

In this, he and his colleagues have shown that targeting, by immunisation, a specific molecule responsible for the failure of the central nervous system to regenerate in spinal cord injury and other neurodegenerative disorders, can also blunt clinical signs and the progression of multiple sclerosis in an experimental model of the disease.

'This suggests that blocking this deleterious molecule may help maintain or restore the neuronal integrity of the central nervous system in diseases like MS,' Professor Bernard said. He and his colleagues were among the first to focus on immune 'T cells' implicated in the degeneration of myelin, the covering on nerve fibres, that were capable of routinely inducing an MS-like disease in mice. He was also among the first to demonstrate that susceptibility to this MS-like disease, as well as immune responses to myelin, are under genetic control.

More recently, he and his colleagues identified genetic factors on T cells that are associated with the susceptibility of MS in humans.

In association with colleagues at Stanford and University of California, San Francisco, he has employed sophisticated gene array analyses of MS tissues focusing on an immune-system protein known as 'osteopontin'. This protein appears to play a crucial role in the immune attack in MS and its progression, and thus may present a target for future experimental therapies.

While Professor Bernard's research has primarily concentrated on unravelling the inflammatory processes leading to MS, he has also made major contributions to the more general fields of immunology, evolutionary genetics and neuroscience.

The Bethlehem Griffiths Research Foundation was established in 1994. It has committed approximately $2.2 million to research into palliative care and progressive neurological diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis and Motor Neurone Disease.

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