EMBL Australia group leader Dr Qi Zhang has been awarded a prestigious CSL Centenary Fellowship that will see $1.25 million over five years go towards her cutting-edge epigenetics research, which may lead to new classes of drugs for cancer and developmental diseases.
Dr Qi Zhang – hosted at the South Australian immunoGENomics Cancer Institute (SAiGENCI), University of Adelaide – is investigating the fundamental processes by which our cells turn genes on and off as they change identities, for example, as stem cells develop into mature cell types. She hopes to learn how these processes can break down and lead to cancer and other diseases.
“We want to know what’s happening with the packaging of our DNA in a healthy cell,” she says. “Then we want to know what is going wrong in a cancer cell – when it loses its identity.”
Using the CSL Centenary Fellowship, Dr Zhang hopes to generate fundamental knowledge that researchers around the world can use to develop new drugs to tackle epigenetic misregulation in cancers.
Dr Clare Weeden, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, was also awarded a CSL Centenary Fellowship at the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences Annual Meeting on 24 October in Adelaide.
Dr Weedon researches why lung cancer is on the rise in cities around the world and aims to determine if abnormal lung cell states are reversible.
CSL Head of Research and Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Andrew Nash said, “Dr Zhang and Dr Weeden are both making fundamental discoveries about how normal cells develop and how that development can go wrong, leading to cancer and other diseases.”
“With the support of their CSL Centenary Fellowships, their research will open up paths to new kinds of treatment for cancer and developmental diseases,” he said.
“The CSL Centenary Fellowships aim to support leading mid-career Australian researchers like Qi and Clare by providing funding stability to enable the delivery of innovations that could transform medicine for patients living with rare and serious diseases and protect public health.”
Watch this video to learn more about Dr Zhang’s research:
UNDERSTANDING GENE SWITCHING TO BETTER TARGET EPIGENETIC CAUSES OF CANCER AND DISEASE
The genes in our cells are packaged as chromatin, a highly organised and condensed structure made up of DNA and packaging proteins called histones. Chemical modifications to the DNA and these proteins, known as epigenetic modifications, affect how genes are expressed and hence control cell identity and behaviour.
Most cancers are caused by changes to our DNA sequence. However, this is not the only factor driving cancer development – epigenetic misregulation also controls how cancers arise and respond to treatments. There are drugs that tackle these epigenetic causes of cancer, but they have significant side effects.
Dr Zhang is investigating the epigenetic processes that turn genes on and turn off to influence the development of individual cells for good and for bad.
With the help of the CSL Centenary Fellowship, her work has the potential to open up opportunities for new kinds of drugs for cancer and developmental diseases.
She plans to investigate the mode of action of certain protein complexes that influence the future development of cells. These complexes are essential epigenetic regulators in development, and accordingly aberrant activities of these protein complexes are associated with human diseases. Little is known about the detailed operation of these complexes, other than that their action varies in different cell types. So, drugs targeting these complexes have, to date, been relatively unsuccessful.
Dr Zhang has already developed technologies to study these protein complexes. It’s complex work which will build on her team’s expertise in cell biology, protein biochemistry and structural biology. She will use tools including genomics, AI and cryo-electron microscopy in her investigations.
Following a bachelor degree in Chinese traditional medicine, Dr Zhang turned to a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology at China Agricultural University. That was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship studying gene regulation at the University of Toronto. In 2016, she moved to Monash University, where she held an ARC DECRA Fellowship.
Dr Zhang moved to Adelaide in 2023, where she is an NHMRC Investigator and an EMBL Australia group leader at SAiGENCI.
About the CSL Centenary Fellowships
The Fellowships are competitively selected, high-value grants available to mid-career Australians who wish to continue a career in medical research in Australia.
They are open to medical researchers working on discovery or translational research with a focus on rare or serious diseases and are overseen by a selection committee comprising three independent members and two CSL representatives. The 2025 committee was chaired by Dr Andrew Nash.
The Fellowships were established to mark 100 years since the establishment of CSL in 1916. Two individual, five-year A$1.25 million fellowships are awarded each calendar year.
More information on the CSL Centenary Fellowships here.