Oral Presentation ESA-SRB-APEG-NZSE 2022

New FKBPL and CD44-based diagnostics for preeclampsia: from discovery to a point of care test (#9)

Lana McClements 1
  1. University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Dr McClements is a qualified Clinical Pharmacist who is now a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Science and the Institute for Biomedical Materials and Devices at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She graduated with MPharm from King’s College London (UK) and after five years of working at two hospitals in London as a Clinical Pharmacist, Dr McClements was awarded a PhD scholarship and completed her PhD at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland, UK) in 2014. In 2018, Dr McClements moved to UTS to take up a lectureship position where she now leads a team of five PhD students, two-three Honours students and three Research Assistants. As a chief investigator over the last 5-7 years, she has led impactful research program that strives to improve women’s health from pregnancy and beyond, and from bench to bedside. She discovered and patented two new blood-based biomarkers of impaired angiogenesis, FKBPL and CD44, in pregnancy, which are being commercialised for prediction and diagnosis of preeclampsia. Recently, she was awarded a 2022 Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship to develop new personalised treatments for preeclampsia that target FKBPL signalling. Furthermore, Dr McClements’ group designed innovative 3D multicellular models of early placenta and women’s heart disease for high-throughput screening of biomarkers and therapeutics. Her funded work by the Cardiac and Vascular Health SPHERE (Maridulu Budyari Gumal) Clinical Academic Network that includes multidisciplinary team from UTS, University of New South Wales, and South-Eastern Sydney LHD (SESLHD) will facilitate the development of a new 3D platform for personalised medicine management of women at high risk of developing heart disease post-hypertensive disorders in pregnancy. She is also evaluating an emerging treatment for preeclampsia based on mesenchymal stem cell-derived extracellular vehicles, funded by the NSW Cardiovascular Research Network (CVRN) through the National Heart Foundation of Australia. Dr McClements contributes to a culture of excellence beyond the borders of her own research including her leadership of the Academic Women in Science (AWiS) network (~100 women) and as the Chair of the Science Equity and Diversity Committee at UTS. She was awarded high commendation as an Emerging Health Researchers by BUPA Foundation in 2020 and was a finalist in the UTS Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence (Early Career Researcher 2020 and Research Leadership and Development 2022) and 2020 Johnson & Johnson Maternal Health Quickfire Challenge in the USA.