And the winners are….!

BDSRA Australia has awarded more than $177,000 across four projects in the 2020 Australia and New Zealand Batten Disease Research Grant round.

The funding will support one-year research projects through 2021 that aim to increase our understanding of Batten disease and have the potential to advance therapeutic strategies.

Our congratulations to the following recipients:

* Professor Alex Hewitt from the University of Tasmania for the project entitled Development and validation of a gene editing therapy for CLN2-related disease, with the award of $50,000

* Associate Professor Anthony Cook from the University of Tasmania for the project Isogenic induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) models with CLN3 variants for high throughput drug screening ($49,400)

* Dr Nadia Mitchell from Lincoln University (NZ) for the project Advancing gene therapy strategies and natural history studies in ovine CLN5 and CLN6 Batten disease ($AU 56,440)

* Associate Professor Ronald Clarke from the University of Sydney for the project Membrane interaction of small molecules capable of improving Batten disease cell phenotypes ($21,256)

Further details on the successful projects and research teams can now be found on our website at https://bdsraaustralia.org/research.