WEHI & Royal Melbourne Hospital – Colonial Foundation Healthy Ageing Centre
Commencing in 2019, the Foundation’s funding helped establish the Colonial Foundation Healthy Ageing Centre (CFHAC), located within WEHI complex in the world-renowned Melbourne Biomedical Precinct. CFHAC brings together researchers from WEHI and pathologists and clinicians from Royal Melbourne Hospital focusing on a research program to develop new diagnostic tests for the early detection of Dementia and other neurological conditions.
Early detection of the Dementia is crucial because by the time symptoms occur, most of the damage cannot be reversed. Diagnosis for dementia is a long and costly process involving extensive and arduous medical and cognitive assessments. CFHAC focused on changing this by building research infrastructure and recruiting talented staff to enable a world-leading platform that integrates high throughput protein analyses into routine clinical care. The establishment of this centre has catalysed research into neurodegeneration and ageing across WEHI and RMH and enabled the development of a unique network of medical researches, clinicians, neuropsychiatrists, pathologists, patient advocacy groups and philanthropists, working together to make a vision of enhanced care for patients a reality.
CFHAC’s achievements include building the world’s largest dataset of proteomics (protein-focused analysis) of clinical samples of age-related diseases, and discovering a potential new blood test for early-stage dementia.
CFHAC’s discovery work is already being successfully applied in the hospital setting.
The success of this Centre has fostered the establishment of the new Colonial Foundation Diagnostic Centre.
