Associate Professor Alice Pébay

Associate Professor Alice Pébay, PhD leads the Neuroregeneration Research Unit at Centre for Eye Research Australia in Melbourne. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience and has an extensive expertise in cell biology, including in neural cells, stem cell biology and lysophospholipid biology. Her work looks at human pluripotent stem cells which have the potential to develop into any type of cell in the body. She is researching how these cells maintain their pluripotency (their ability to become any type of cell) and what might make them develop into eye or nerve cells.

Associate Professor Alice Pébay was awarded a Macular Disease Foundation Australia Research Grant for $300,000 over two years.

Associate Professor Pébay’s research is titled ‘Modelling geographic atrophy using human pluripotent stem cells’.

Her project is a collaboration between The University of Melbourne and The University of Queensland and aims to better understand the mechanisms causing dry AMD by developing a laboratory model using human retinal cells produced from induced pluripotent stem cells from 120 people with dry AMD, and comparing these to retinal cells produced from people without dry AMD. The cells from AMD patients will include a wide range of genetic variations that have been linked to an increased risk of the disease.

We hope that this approach will help us to better understand the processes that cause disease and identify relevant new targets for treatments in a way that has not been possible till now.

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