Professor James Hudson
Queensland Institute of Medical Research
Professor James Hudson is Group Leader of the Cardiac Bioengineering Group at QIMR Berghofer. His research focuses on the development of human cardiac organoids that provide a representation of human heart tissue in a dish. This has led to the discovery of biological processes regulating cardiac biology and new therapeutic candidates.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. The $8-million Snow Medical grant will fund Professor Hudson’s research to speed up drug development pipelines by providing a publicly available model of the heart and new therapeutic targets to treat cardiovascular disease.
James Hudson and research team.
Professor Hudson will investigate different signaling pathways to build a computer model of the heart so that researchers can better understand how the heart works. This computer model will accelerate research by being able to do experiments in the computer and predicting the best therapeutic targets, rather than using normal models on animals which can take years. Using these approaches, Professor Hudson hopes to find new ways to improve heart function.
The resource his team is developing has enormous potential applications across academia and industry internationally. The highly multidisciplinary nature of the project will require training a new generation of scientists and the development of new collaborative and data dissemination frameworks. The project will lead to new commercialisation opportunities, new industries and a better quality of life for cardiovascular patients. He hopes similar approaches will be taken to tackle other major biomedical problems in other organ systems.
Professor Hudson graduated from The University of Queensland with a PhD in Biotechnology. He completed his postdoctoral training under the guidance of Professor Wolfram-Hubertus Zimmermann, one of the most prominent cardiac tissue engineering researchers. In his spare time, he is a keen surfer and enjoys spending his weekends fishing and camping.