World class technology and talent battle cancer at the Centenary Institute

The Centenary Institute, one of Australia’s leading medical research institutes, unveiled a powerful microscope unlike any other in Australia today. Representing the cutting edge in medical technology and microscopy, the unique imaging features of the multiphoton microscope will enable scientists at the Centenary Institute unprecedented access to the secret workings of living tissues at the cellular and molecular level.

The Centenary Institute is equally excited about the arrival of Austrian Professor Wolfgang Weninger, one of only a handful of people in the world who specialises in using the multiphoton microscope in the immunology field to view immune responses in real-time in living tissue.

At the Centenary, Professor Weninger will lead a team of researchers to study the dynamics of the immune system’s response to cancer and infectious diseases.

Professor Weninger said, “Cancer is still a leading cause of death in Australia. There is a need to develop improved anti-cancer therapies based on the use of the body’s own resources – namely our immune system. This type of microscope is an outstanding tool to study how our bodies fight cancer both in early and advanced stages. If we can learn more about how our immune system attacks cancer cells directly in the context of intact tissues, we hope to develop improved immuno-therapies.”

Using the multiphoton microscope, Professor Weninger’s team pioneered ground-breaking imaging models to record how the body’s defences fight tumours and infectious diseases. He has already astounded the medical community in Australia and the world by showing real-time videos of white blood cells invading and destroying cancer cells in living tissue. Centenary’s Executive Director, Professor Mathew Vadas said, “The arrival of Professor Weninger and the multiphoton microscope marks a new era in medical research for the Centenary Institute.

With one of his recently published papers among the ten all-time highest-ranked papers in biomedicine, we are honoured to have such an eminent researcher as Professor Weninger join the Centenary Institute.

I am confident that the results of his team’s research will vastly improve our understanding of how the body’s immune system fights cancer and infectious diseases. The multiphoton microscope will also support the research of other Centenary scientists particularly in autoimmune and liver diseases.”

The multiphoton microscope at the Centenary Institute has two unique features, its imaging mode and laser. The unique imaging mode uses multiple laser beams and means fast moving objects and dynamic processes in living tissue can be viewed, for example, cells in the blood stream. The laser has been enhanced with a unit called an OPO that produces longer wavelengths of light than those used in other microscopes enabling researchers to potentially look deeper into living tissue than ever before.