Our top scientists and the discovery that could revolutionise cancer, eczema treatment – The Age

On Wednesday night, Dr Mackay was named Australia's Life Scientist of the Year. She was among seven scientists, school teachers and research teams from across Australia recognised with a Prime Minister's Science Prize the nation's top science awards. This year five of the seven prizes were awarded to women. All winners will share in $750,000 in prize money.

"This new field really is going to change the way we make new vaccines," Dr Mackay told The Age.

Her work focuses on the role of the body's T cells, referred to as the "foot soldiers" of the immune system.

Previously, scientists imagined these cells patrolling around our body through our blood stream, always watching for new infections. But they aren't just in our blood they are also in our skin, lungs, gut and brain.

"What was overlooked for a long time purely from not looking in the right place was if you go into the skin or the lung, we found healthy T cells in there too, and we found they were different," says Dr Mackay, who is based at Melbourne's Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity.

Rather than patrolling, the cells have dug trenches and set up a permanent fortress against attack. They are able to attack a virus as soon as it enters the skin or lungs an immediate, powerful form of immunity.

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"They are ready to go. They are frontline troops," says Professor Turner. "What Laura has been able to do is really nut out how these cells are generated in the first place. How are they made, and how they stay in the tissue."

Dr Mackay's discovery has scientists working to determine if this new-found layer of defence can be used to create better vaccines.

The vaccines we use today are designed to train patrolling T cells to catch and kill invaders. A vaccine that trained both patrolling and fortified cells could be much more powerful. Two new vaccines incorporating the technology, for malaria and HIV, are now in the early stages of testing.

Immunotherapy, a cutting-edge new anti-cancer weapon, is able to train immune cells to attack cancer. Scientists are now working to see if we can train the frontline cells living in our skin to attack tumours.

The work also has implications for allergy treatments. Skin-based immune cells could be behind allergic reactions like the red rashes that break out on the skin of people with eczema.

Emeritus Professor Cheryl Praeger from the University of Western Australia took out the top prize for her work on mathematical theory.

Emeritus Professor Cheryl Praeger, winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Professor Praeger specialises in group theory, a type of mathematics important in cryptography the art of writing or solving codes. Her work has also contributed to search engine design, and she mentored Akshay Venkatesh, the Australian winner of the 2018 Fields Medal mathematics equivalent of a Nobel prize.

She was only the second woman ever appointed a mathematics professor at an Australian university, and now has more than 410 publications to her name.

"What I love about mathematics is the way that it explains the world. It makes sense of the world," she said.

The University of Sydneys Associate Professor Elizabeth New was named Physical Scientist of the Year for developing new tools to watch what happens inside cells in real time.

Liam is The Age and Sydney Morning Herald's science reporter

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Our top scientists and the discovery that could revolutionise cancer, eczema treatment - The Age