News

Epilepsy Researcher wins prestigious Larkins prize
By KAte Hannah
April 20, 2008

Slave Petrovski  investigating Pharmacogenetics in Epilepsy treatment as part of his honours year in Medicine was honoured this month with the prestigious Larkins Prize - an award granted annually to the top achieving honours student within the Department of Medicine at The Royal Melbourne and Western Hospitals. 

The award was delivered personally by Professor Richard Larkins, who is currently Vice Chancellor of Monash University and who has previously held positions at the University as James Stewart Professor of the Department of Medicine (RMH/WH) and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences.

Slave started his Honours year in Medicine with a unique background in Information systems and Science, majoring in Genetics, which led him to a project investigating Pharmacogenetics in Epilepsy treatment.

Slave's project resulted in the development and validation of a model that could predict the outcome of drug treatment, specifically anti-epileptic drugs among individual patients.

Significantly, this is the first time such a model has been reported that successfully predicts the outcome of drug treatment for any disease area making Slave's finding one of major international significance for the whole field of pharmacogenomics, and for the development of clinically useful biomarkers of treatment outcome.
 
The methodology he developed to identify the predictive genetic markers from over 4000 possibilities also has the potential to identify important genetic determinants of diseases  and treatment.

Slave's work has formed a major component of a patent application, which has sparked significant interest from international biotechnology and medical diagnostics companies.