2023-24 Premier’s Awards for Health and Medical Research - Dr Laura Ross

2023-24 Premier’s Awards for Health and Medical Research
Dr Laura Ross
Winner, Clinical Researcher Award
PhD Project: Addressing knowledge gaps in the assessment of disease status in systemic sclerosis.
Systemic sclerosis, commonly known as scleroderma, is a devastating autoimmune disease that causes scarring of skin, blood vessels and internal organs. It most commonly affects women in middle age and drastically reduces life expectancy, with few effective treatments available.
Discovery of new and effective treatment requires the accurate identification of disease manifestations and specific assessment of disease activity in clinical trials. To address this knowledge gap, Dr Laura Ross assembled an international group of scleroderma experts to develop a disease activity index; a new instrument for measuring treatment response in clinical trials. It has been hailed as ‘an important milestone’ by the international rheumatology community and implemented in international interventional and observational studies to improve the treatment and understanding of scleroderma.
Dr Ross has led pioneering work establishing the importance of patient-reported symptoms in scleroderma assessment leading to the establishment of a world-first Scleroderma Palliative Care Clinic. Additionally, Dr Ross has established the clinical importance of scleroderma heart involvement. In a series of seminal studies, Dr Ross documented the profound burden of physical disability suffered by scleroderma patients as a result of scarring and inflammation of both heart and skeletal muscle. These studies identified novel mechanisms of physical disability in scleroderma, forcing a paradigm shift in our understanding of the importance of heart and skeletal muscle involvement.
Dr Ross’ research has directly improved the care of scleroderma patients, understanding of specific disease manifestations and design of international research trials to investigate scleroderma treatments.