15-16 June 2023 at the Peter Doherty Institute

About the workshop

The Wild Immunology group at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania is attempting to develop an oral bait vaccine to protect Tasmanian devils from the devil facial tumour disease (DFTD). Due to limited number of immunologists in Tasmania, the Menzies team is coming to Melbourne to engage with the rich immunology community in mainland Australia. Professor Katherine Kedzierska and Dr Louise Rowntree are helping us organise workshop at the Peter Doherty Institute (PDI) in Melbourne, Victoria on 15 June 2023.

Dr Andrew Flies will provide an overview of the two types of devil facial tumours (DFT1, DFT2), our current vaccine strategy, and constraints on the project at the PDI Department of Microbiology & Immunology seminar on 15 June. After the seminar there will be an afternoon tea, followed by two talks to prep workshop participants for breakout sessions to “Build a better DFT1/2 vaccine”. We hope to carry on discussions at Naughtons Hotel after the workshop. Members of the Wild Immunology group will be in Melbourne before and after the workshop, so we hope to setup other meetings with people interested in helping the Tasmanian devil. Contact andy.flies@utas.edu.au to register for the workshop or setup a meeting with one of our team members.

Do we have a vaccine to stop devil facial tumour disease yet? No. Are we making progress? Yes. We published 4 papers in 3 months and won an Australian Research Council #LinkageProject grant. Read about here it here in The Conversation. Thank you to the Menzies Institute for Medical Research and the University of Tasmania for many years of support for our research!

https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-tasmanian-devils-are-dying-from-cancer-but-a-new-vaccine-approach-could-help-us-save-them-194536.

The excellent hosts Dr Travis Brown and Steve Davis interview Ruth Pye and Andrew Flies from wild immunology group at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research.

https://omny.fm/shows/the-adelaide-show/transmissible-cancers

Really excited to see our low-budget honours project study turn into a manuscript. Note that this manuscript has not been peer reviewed yet, but we hope to see this published in 2022. This lays the foundation for the bait aspect of our oral bait vaccine to protect #Tasmanian #devils from the devil facial tumour disease #DFTD. We have a long way to go on the bait and vaccine but we are accelerating progress on both research streams and we have a great team in place to carry it forward. Congratulations to Sean Dempsey for taking on the challenge of getting this bait project started and climbing up several steep learning curves in 2021.

Read the pre-print paper here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.13.486902v1

Here is a quick look at a dexterous devil grabbing a bait from the a bait dispenser.

https://www.scienceinpictures.com/comics/rewilding-immunology