A village in a dish and a beating mini heart just won Australia's top stem cell prizes

Two Australian researchers who grow living human tissue in the lab to understand disease have won the 2026 Metcalf Prizes for Stem Cell Research, each receiving A$60,000 (about $42,000) to take their work further. In Brisbane, Dr Drew Neavin of the University of Queensland grows stem cells from scores of different people together in a single dish — a 'village in a dish' — to learn why a bipolar medicine that helps one person can fail, or even harm, another. The method makes those large studies faster and cheaper, and could one day give doctors a simple test for which drug to prescribe. In Sydney, Dr James McNamara, who has just set up his own laboratory at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, grew tiny beating 'mini hearts' from the stem cells of patients with inherited heart disease, and used them to develop a gene therapy that restored heart function in lab-grown tissue and in mice. The prizes, awarded by the National Stem Cell Foundation of Australia, honour work aimed at personalised treatment for the 568,000 Australians living with bipolar disorder and for families living with genetic heart disease.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: funding & finance