PhD supervisors Associate Professor Simon Barry, from the Discipline of Paediatrics at the University of Adelaide, and Dr Adrian Cummins from the Department of Gastroenterology at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, believe the ongoing study of regulatory immune cells could help pinpoint the causes of a range of diseases, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Type 1 diabetes and even asthma.

"In all autoimmune diseases, the immune system accidentally starts to attack tissues and organs that it should normally leave alone. The regulatory cells are obviously not doing their job and we need to understand why," Dr Barry says.

Dr Eastaff-Leung will spend the next 12 months working with Assoc. Prof. Barry developing a novel biomarker for these regulatory immune cells in collaboration with Professor Heddy Zola from the Cooperative Research Centre for Biomarker Translation.

"We are going to see if we can add a new layer of sophistication to this research," Assoc. Prof. Barry says. "If the new biomarker is a protein that plays an important functional role we can work on that to restore the balance in the immune system."

More than 700,000 individuals are living with inflammatory bowel disease in the US, UK and Australia.

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