The following article appeared on the RMIT Medical Sciences website and permission was kindly given by RMIT to reproduce the article on our website. This does not imply that RMIT either supports or opposes The MAWA Trust's aims and activities.
March 03, 2003
Hala Raghib
Former RMIT Honours student, Ms Hala Raghib, is the first Australian to receive the inaugural MAWA (Medical Advances Without Animals) Postgraduate Scholarship.
Funding the three year scholarship, the MAWA Trust supports research that does not involve the use of animals and in the development of alternatives to laboratory animals.
Having completed Honours in the Bachelor of Medical Laboratory Science (2002), Hala was interviewed by a panel of senior medical academics and specialists.
Hala strongly advocates not using rats in experiments because of difficulties she experiences in reproducing results, and the ease with which these are skewed by the rats ’ age and diet.
Her project, “Death by QT: a new safety challenge”, considers an alternative approach to transfect (‘infect’) an immortalised human cell line with the relevant human ion channels, and then use this to monitor drug actions for potential cardiac disturbances.Drugs known to affect QT in humans will then be addressed in the cell system.This will then test the predictability of the methodology with relevance to human safety testing.
The QT interval is becoming an increasingly used indicator of disturbances in the heart and so accurate testing of the effects of chemicals on this interval will prove invaluable to the production of safer drugs.
We wish Hala well with her project.