In Honour of Professor Cristobal dos Remedios on behalf of the MAWA Trust

Six years ago, The Medical Advances Without Animals Trust (MAWA) welcomed Professor Cristobal dos Remedios onto MAWA’s Board and Scientific Advisory Panel following the retirement of Professor Stephen Leeder (MAWA’s first Chair) from The University of Sydney.

MAWA’s aim is to advance medical science and improve human health and therapeutic interventions without using animals for medical research. MAWA works cooperatively and productively with the scientific research community and has a partnership with The Australian National University. Each year, MAWA provides scholarships, fellowships, grants, bursaries and sponsorships to universities and research institutions throughout Australia.

Cris was well known to MAWA Trustee, Professor Anne Keogh, and MAWA Board members, Professors Deborah Marriott and Kieran Fallon, having taught them all during their medical training in the seventies. It was no surprise to them when, in 2014, Cris was voted as one of the sixty most memorable and influential teachers in the history of The University of Sydney where he lectured for decades.

Many years of managing MAWA’s scholarships and grants programme gave MAWA’s Executive Director an insight into and an appreciation of Cris’ significant impact on the students he taught and the early career scientists he supervised. Testimonials consistently referred to Cris as an excellent teacher and a wonderful mentor who always acted above and beyond the call of duty. Throughout his career, Cris has been described as a kind, caring and modest man with endless energy.

In the late eighties, Cris began a collaboration with Dr Victor Chang, the pioneer of heart and lung transplant surgery in Australia and established the Sydney Heart Bank (SHB) for both healthy and diseased human heart tissue. Dr Chang gave approval for specimens to be taken from heart transplant procedures at St Vincent’s Hospital and Professor Keogh (Senior Heart Transplant Cardiologist) provided support and assistance. Cris was so dedicated to the SHB that he collected many of the specimens himself, at whatever time of night or day the transplant was being performed.

The SHB is one of the largest human heart banks in existence. It is recognised as a key experimental resource for those studying the biochemistry, genetics, physiology and anatomy of hearts. It operates as an open-source heart bank with no fees which allows international researchers to simply apply to obtain tissues. Tissue samples have been used by more than ninety research teams around the world. In 2014 MAWA awarded the SHB an equipment grant, and in 2017 awarded a research grant to a team of Australian researchers for their work in developing experimental alternatives to animal models using human heart tissue from the SHB.

Many years ago, Cris developed alternative methods to reduce and replace the use of animals in his research as a protein chemist/biophysicist. This created a natural alignment with MAWA’s aim and principles. More recently, Cris has been instrumental in assisting Professor Keogh to establish a new Tissue Bank at St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney. Cris and Anne believe that the use of human tissue in research can substantially reduce the use of animal models and create more efficacious outcomes.

Earlier this year, Cris was appointed Adjunct Professor at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute where he will be collaborating with Professor Boris Martinac. Boris is a past recipient of MAWA funding for his animal replacement research and now serves on MAWA’s Scientific Advisory Panel. MAWA looks forward to the outcomes of this unique research.

MAWA’s Trustees and Board members would like to take this opportunity to honour Cris on the occasion of his 80th birthday. We particularly wish to express our gratitude and appreciation for his invaluable advice and input to MAWA and his significant contribution to the rapidly developing field of animal replacement in scientific research.