To sum up, about 3 weeks ago our entire lab headed to Sydney for a Symposium on RNAi. The week after was a mandatory student conference in our faculty for all postgrads. Subsequently, a vacation was necessary, up in the Great Barrier Reef in Northern Australia.
Here goes..my travel journal.
Thursday, Nov. 18 ~ Hosing around Sydney
There are tonnes of fab, clean hostels around Sydney's Central Station, a 200 year old train station and central point of the local trams. the funkiest one is prob YHA Railway Square, where they've converted old railway carriages into rooms. We took the day off and rolled into Sydney at noon, and had some meals in the downtown core's Chinatown (there are tonnes of little suburbs synonymous with different Asian groups. and of course, chalk full of asians). We re-fueled on BBT and took a walk down to Circular Quay, where the landmark Harbour Bridge & the Opera House lay (Oprah's coming soon, and in honour of that, the Aussies are going to rename the house, "Oprah House"). By the evening, we stopped for a few beers, I'd promised the new Austrian student a sampling of the local brew (John Squire's Amber Ale, and Boags, far better tasting than any North American standards).
Friday, Nov. 19 ~ Symposium Talks
We got up and had brekkie at a really eclectic little Italian cafe that sold Italian pastries and coffee in Yuppy-central. The wait staff were dressed like Dickheads/Hipsters:
The place also had it's rustic antique furniture up for sale (chair = $100..no thanks..).
then we made our way to the Princesses's lecture Theatre where the Symposium was held. The chief reps and sponsors of the Research Facility once included Princess Diana, and now currently Crown Princess Mary of Denmark. Little known fact, Princess Mary is actually Australian. She's from Sydney and she met her future royal hubby at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
The Symposium poster and title is below. Appropriately it was called Charting the Depths. Because when you think about it, research in this field is like a bottomless ocean or pit of unknown data and stuff. 98% of the human genome is non-coding RNA. The proportion is similar in other organisms. What could all that crap do? It's obviously all there for a purpose, as one academic would say. It's not all noise. Or the cell wouldn't bother making it and stashing it.
Attaching roles to the non-protein making RNA is a new field. 10 years ago no one would touch it. It was a pandora's box, a can of worms. you were really scraping the bottom.
(RNAi: tiny single stranded RNAs, 20-22 base pairs long, they do not encode proteins. but they can regulate the protein production of genes as much as 1000s of base pairs long. It's very David and Goliath.)
Now it's being hailed as the next big thing in medicine, whether in cancer research, genetic disease or common flus, and HIV. It's considered the "magic bullet" in industry. Because it's a small product, it's very powerful and it's fast acting. (They're working on doses of 10-100 micrograms per kilogram of human tissue. For antibiotics, you need about 100 miligrams per kilo of tissue. that's about 1000x higher). It's cheap to make. Currently 2 billion dollars is needed to manufacture and put on market a new chemical drug. 1.5 billion is the average profit. It's a deficit to develop new antibiotics and the like. RNAi is going to change that around, because of it's small size and power.
The downside is that a lot of research is still necessary, in determine appropriate dosages of the stuff, and how to deliver RNA to your sick tissues and cells. the updates on this seemed to suggest we're still a good 10-15 years away from seeing an actual RNAi drug on market, at the very least.
Case in point: mice treated with RNAi drugs directed at the Hepatitis Virus. The mice improved, the viral levels went down. But there was a really high mortality rate. They were dying, because the small RNAs added were overriding their natural RNAi proteins/machinery, outcompeting the natural small RNAs present in their system that were necessary for living.
If there were a few thought I could take home from the talks, is that small RNAs have very diverse roles (hundreds of different ones in different cells and tissues). It very much is like attempting to create a map of the world in colonial times. For hundreds of non-coding RNA there is still almost no way of ascertaining what kind of role they have, but frustratingly, there are hints of some. There's also a lot of exciting new research to come out.
Also it was a quite a long 12 hour day. We were melting in our seats by the end, and ready for the free and wonderfully catered cocktail hour by the end.
Friday, Nov. 19th Evening/Night - Party Time
We were all a little tipsy from the free wine and beers, when some former lab members now in Sydney recommended we go and hit some pub. Our fearless leader joked that we should hit up Oxford Street for a good time. We later realized this street is the famously gay hangout, with the gay and lesbian clubs and bars. Calling his bluff, we told him to lead the way. One thing led to another and we were at a bar, called "totally gay". It had an interesting crew (balding men in leather among other things). Paintings of cowboys on giant bulls and adverts on giant flat screens..that got increasingly dodgy as the night went on.
...to update later. just realized i need to go back to work
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