University Of Tasmania
Research Field: Neuroscience
Imagine surviving cancer, only to suffer from debilitating pain for the rest of your life? Unfortunately, this is a common reality for many people who have had chemotherapy. Chemotherapy can injure the nerves in the skin, causing a condition called chemotherapy-induced neuropathy.
Dr Landowski has identified a natural protein that regenerates nerves in the skin, and have been investigating whether they may prevent chemotherapy-induced neuropathy. She is now working in the areas of stroke and fatigue research. There have been over 1000 treatments developed for stroke that work in animals, but only one of them works in humans.
Why don’t they work in humans? The problem lies in the way these drugs are tested. She is developing a new model for testing these potential therapies, so that drug development for human stroke can be more successful.
Fatigue is much more than just a sense of tiredness. It is also a debilitating symptom of many diseases and disorders, hampering peoples’ ability to perform the simplest of daily activities. We don’t know what causes fatigue. Just like we need energy to go about our day, our brain needs energy to function efficiently and she is also investigating whether fatigue results from an energy deficit in the brain.