METABOLIC PHENOTYPING, LIPIDOMICS & BIOINFORMATICS IN DEMENTIA
With
Dr Luke Whiley
Curtin Medical Research Institute,
Western Australia
RESEARCHER PROFILE
Filmed in Perth, Western Australia | February 2026
Dr Luke Whiley is a dementia researcher whose work focuses on understanding how the body’s metabolism, particularly the biology of fats known as lipids, influences our health throughout ageing.
His research explores how the body responds to illness, lifestyle, and environmental stress at a chemical level, and how these responses shape longterm disease risk. Using advanced blood-based measurement technologies, Dr Whiley studies thousands of small molecules at once to build a snapshot of a person’s metabolic health. By combining these measurements with data science approaches, his work identifies biological pathways that become disrupted in disease, providing insight into why some people are more vulnerable to conditions such as dementia.
A major focus of Dr Whiley’s research is Alzheimer’s disease, where he investigates how genetic risk, particularly variations in genes involved in lipid transport, may affect metabolism across the body and lead to disease. This work highlights the importance of lipids in brain health, helping shift dementia research beyond proteins alone to include broader metabolic processes.
He also studies related questions in Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and COVID19, where metabolic disruption plays a key role in recovery and longterm outcomes. Alongside discovery research, Dr Whiley develops methods that allow detailed metabolic testing using much smaller samples, making future screening and monitoring more accessible.
His overarching goal is to improve understanding, earlier detection, and prevention of neurodegenerative disease, while keeping people with lived experience at the centre of dementia research.
Source: Supplied
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9088-4799
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Liver cancer & patient-derived tumour organoids
Dr Benjamin Dwyer is a translational cancer researcher driven by a clear purpose: to ensure discoveries made in the laboratory genuinely improve outcomes for patients.
Based at Curtin University, he established and now leads the organoid platform within the Liver Cancer Collaborative and directs the WA Organoid Innovation Hub, working at the intersection of biology, medicine and biotechnology to accelerate new treatments for liver cancer.
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Leukaemia microenvironment & high risk childhood leukaemia
Associate Professor Laurence Cheung is now an Associate Professor at the Curtin Medical School as well as Curtin Medical Research Institute, and a Co-head of the Leukaemia Translational Research Laboratory at The Kids.
He has attracted over $8.7 million in research funding, including 16 awards as CIA (over $6.1 million). Assoc Prof Cheung was named the 2019 Cancer Council of WA Early Career Cancer Researcher of the Year and received the STEM Early Career Research Award at Curtin University in 2019.
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ROCK-induced early-onset bowel cancer progression
Professor Michael Samuel is a cell biologist whose research interest is in understanding how cancer mechanobiology influences the tumour microenvironment, thereby promoting tumour progression. He is Professor of Matrix Biology at the University of South Australia, Adelaide and heads the Tumour Microenvironment Laboratory at the Centre for Cancer Biology and the Cancer Mechanotherapies Laboratory at the Basil Hetzel Institute for Translational Health Research.
