“We used dry ice to kill part of the tissue while leaving the surrounding muscle healthy and viable,” Dr Hudson explains.
The goal now is to use this model to potentially find new therapeutic targets to enhance or induce cardiac regeneration in people with heart failure.
“Studying regeneration of these damaged, immature cells will enable us to figure out the biochemical events behind this process,” Dr Hudson says.
“Our goal is to determine how to trigger this replication process in adult hearts for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases.”
Dr Hudson graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical & Biological) from UQ in 2006. Rather than pursuing a career in industry, he chose to undertake a PhD in tissue engineering in the laboratory of Professor Justin Cooper-White, to focus his research at the forefront of biotechnology advances. He then travelled to Goettingen Germany to do postdoctoral research in the lab of Prof Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann at the Heart Research Center Goettingen, a collective of basic and clinically-focused researchers.
In 2013, he was awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia Early Career Fellowship to bring his work to Australia, and has been recently awarded a co-funded NHMRC Career Development and National Heart Foundation Future Leaders Fellowship to continue to advance his research in 2017. For his National Heart Foundation Future Leaders Fellowship he received the Paul Korner innovation award, for the top ranked application nationally.
Dr Hudson’s laboratory hosts five researchers, has produced 22 publications and registered four patents.
The Hudson lab is one of eight core labs in UQ’s Centre for Cardiac and Vascular Biology, which was launched in May. The CCVB recognises the need for a multidisciplinary approach to cardiovascular disease and includes members and affiliates across UQ and Brisbane’s hospitals.