Meet the researchers - Arrow Bone Marrow Transplant Foundation

Cathy Pendergrast was awarded a PhD Scholarship in 2024, with the generous support of Liverpool Catholic Club.

Cathy Pendergrast’s career began with a Sports Science degree in 1991. After graduating, Cathy began working in a junior role in a private respiratory lab, added a Graduate Certificate in Respiratory Science to her qualifications, and eventually moved to a role with the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide.

“It’s such a fulfilling career,” she said. “There are so many different patient groups to work with, and it’s always good to know that you’re making a difference in their lives.”

One of the groups respiratory scientists are beginning to see more frequently is bone marrow and stem cell transplant patients. More and more, transplant teams are sending patients for lung function tests prior to transplant to give them a ‘normal’ pre-transplant understanding of lung function so that they have some data for comparison post-transplant.

“There are a couple of problems with the current testing,” Cathy said. “Lung graft v. host disease begins in the smaller airways of the lungs, towards the alveoli, which is where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged between the bloodstream and the air we breathe in. But the most common test used in respiratory labs at the moment – spirometry – measures how much air you can breathe in and out as well as how fast you can breathe it out. It’s an effective measure for the larger more central airways, but not sensitive enough to detect changes deep in the lungs.”

Cathy’s PhD research will focus on the possibility of using two other tests, which have been used successfully in other clinical areas, but not so much yet in lung graft v. host disease.

Dr Michael Ashby was awarded the Arrow HSANZ PhD Scholarship in 2024.

Originally from Tasmania, Michael graduated from the University of Tasmania and subsequently completed physician training in Melbourne at Austin and Northern Health in general medicine and Haematology at Austin, Alfred and Monash Health. He has worked in several regions across Victoria including as Leukaemia Research Fellow at Alfred Health where he has been involved as an investigator in numerous trials.

He has a sub-interest in myeloid disorders including acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), myelodisplastic syndrome (MDS), myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) as well as acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and bone marrow transplant. He is passionate about and aims to complete further work in translational research and development and management of clinical trials.

Michael’s PhD project will study methods of preventing relapse after transplant. First, he will compare two methods of transplant treatment to see how these methods impact donor immune cells ability to eliminate the leukaemia cells. Second, he will use state-of-the-art technologies to advance our understanding of how leukaemia cells evolve to escape the new immune system. Finally, he will establish a clinical trial to determine if a new oral medication taken shortly after transplant can prevent the evolution of the leukaemia cells and relapse.

Ritika Saxena has been awarded the 2022 Hawkesbury Canoe Classic PhD Scholarship for her stem cell research project aiming to help patients with blood cancers or bone marrow failure. After losing her grandmother to multiple myeloma (a cancer of plasma cells) almost a decade ago, Ritika hopes this research will help other families affected by cancer.

Ritika is conducting her PhD research at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and her work focuses on understanding the formation of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) – rare cells that have self-renewal capacity and the ability to regenerate all the different cell types that comprise the blood forming system.

“Donor HSCs, ideally from matched siblings, are used in bone marrow transplants to treat patients with blood cancers or bone marrow failure,” she said. “However, for patients who do not have a perfectly matched donor, this treatment may not be available.”

Ritika will study how these cells can be made in the lab from a patient’s own cells to enable future scientist to generate HSCs for those who lack a perfectly matched donor.

Natalia Pinello has had a long-standing passion for RNA biology. After completing her undergraduate studies at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, she joined the Genetics Department at the Clemente Estable Biological Research Institute where she studied microRNA synthesis pathways in cancer. Since then, she has been fascinated by the complexity of transcriptional regulation. In 2012 she joined the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at the Centenary Institute, Sydney, led by Professor John Rasko. There she worked as a research assistant for Dr. Justin Wong, where she contributed to seminal work on alternative splicing and gene expression regulation, published in numerous prestigious scientific journals including Cell, Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research and Genome Biology. In 2019 Natalia was awarded the Arrow Hawkesbury Canoe Classic PhD Scholarship. Her PhD aims to characterise the role of RNA modifications in haematopoiesis and leukaemia. Natalia completed her studies under the supervision of Dr Wong at the Epigenetics and RNA Biology Program at the Centenary Institute.

In 2019 Michael Papadimitrious was awarded his PhD from the University of Sydney for his research into the use of dendritic cells to elicit an anti cancer immune response against certain blood cancers.

This research was made possible thanks to the Arrow Hawkesbury Canoe Classic Scholarship which supported Michael during his PhD studies between 2014 and 2016.

Today Michael lives in Germany where he is working for a pharmaceutical company that specialises in cell and gene therapies for oncology patients, where he is developing CAR-T cell therapy.

In 2020 Alexander published a paper with the results of his PhD research into Minimal Residual Disease (MRD). MRD is the left-over cancer cells that can exist in a patient after treatment and that can often lead to cancer recurrence. To counter MRD, Alexander designed and synthesised two hybrid molecules that can be used as a pharmacological probe to investigate the drug resistance mechanisms that lead to MRD.

Since then Alexander has relocated to Brisbane joining the Queensland University of Technology in a super group called the Cancer and Ageing Research Program (CARP). The CARP program aims to discover mechanisms to treat all age-related illnesses and cancers – extending upon Alexander’s previous works.

Alexander was awarded the Arrow Hawkesbury Canoe Classic Scholarship in 2014.