Keryn Johnson

Keryn Johnson

Plant and animal extracts have been used to aid healing since civilisation began – how many of us, for example, have swallowed garlic to chase a cold away or soothed a nettle sting with a dock leaf? Marrying those ancient natural healing properties with cutting edge scientific knowledge is opening the door to a raft of new therapeutics with potential to tackle a soaring, global healthcare problem – treating difficult-to-heal wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers.

Industrial Research Limited (IRL) in Lower Hutt is at the forefront of New Zealand’s wound healing research. Led by research scientist Dr Keryn Johnson, the IRL team is focused on developing effective treatments to accelerate healing, eliminate infection and combat what Dr Johnson describes as an “epidemic increase” in wounds that fail to heal.

“It’s an age old problem but one that is getting worse because of our ageing population and modern lifestyles which have led to much greater rates of obesity and Type II diabetes,” says Dr Johnson.

Diabetes is a leading cause of chronic wounds, with 35 per cent of the costs of diabetes treatment attributed to treating diabetic foot ulcers, many of which lead to amputations. The wounds are estimated to cost New Zealand’s health care system more than $90 million a year.

One of the potential breakthroughs from the IRL team working in collaboration with University of Otago staff at the Wellington School of Medicine, is a natural extract from grapefruit skin which has been shown to promote healing through the stimulation of new blood vessels.

If treatments based on the extract perform well in evaluation trials, they could ultimately be used for all kinds of healing from minor cuts to surgical wounds.

Dr Johnson has specialist expertise in the healing properties of another, less well known natural product, which is also showing promise as a source of beneficial compounds for wound healing and joint care. It’s the extracellular matrix (ECM), tissue that all animals have and which makes up around 80 per cent of the waste from red meat processing. It is the host environment for cells, is made up mostly of collagen and holds the signals that direct cells to divide, differentiate and build themselves into a specific form, offering significant potential for regeneration and healing.

In partnership with Meat and Livestock Australia, Dr Johnson’s team at IRL has developed a wound care gel and a joint care nutraceutical from ECM. Dr Johnson’s knowledge of the ECM is also helping New Zealand biotechnology company Mesynthes develop products for wound healing and surgical tissue reinforcement procedures.

Dr Johnson and other IRL scientists have helped the company better understand the biological components in its products and develop a commercial scale manufacturing process which uses ‘biomimicry’, where the natural properties of the tissue are harnessed to aid its processing.

Dr Johnson had a fascination with the natural world from an early age. “My father used to call me a bugger of a boy because I was endlessly catching bugs, beetles and frogs and bringing them inside. However, developing wound healing therapeutics was far from his mind when he took a year off science after completing an MSc in Molecular Genetics at Canterbury University. He taught hip hop dancing for six months, then viewed the university from a completely different angle, as a construction site worker on a campus building project.

A career in physical work was shortlived, however, and Dr Johnson’s love of science beckoned him back to more study, enrolling in a PhD at Victoria University in Wellington. His thesis-related work on isolating, characterising and comparing sheep and pig pancreatic enzymes made Keryn a natural candidate for an IRL project to develop an enzyme kit for sequencing RNA for a US company. He joined IRL full time in 2001 and has worked in the wound healing area ever since.

Like many of his colleagues, Dr Johnson does much more than research in the lab, playing a role in navigating what he calls the ‘dead zone’ between research and commercialisation.

“It can be very frustrating trying to find a way to secure funds or find commercial partners to progress things you have discovered. Scientists have to work hand in hand with business development staff because understanding issues around your intellectual property position or which are the decisions that are deal breakers, are a vital part of getting the research to market.

“It’s a long slow process and is not just about getting money from anywhere – as a crown research institute we are focused on creating value for New Zealand so we want to make sure the returns come back here.”

For Dr Johnson, being ‘on the bench’ and using his creativity to create and develop new therapies is the most rewarding part of his job, although he tries to always keep an end goal in mind.

“Even when you are doing fundamental science, you probably have an inkling of how it could be used in day-to-day life. The closer you get to marketing it, the more refined the idea becomes and the scale of the opportunity is clearly identified.”

Work is demanding and at home Dr Johnson has a full house as well – he is father to four children aged between five-and-a-half and just a few months. “I still turn on a bit of music at times that makes me want to boogie and I will certainly be teaching my kids to dance.”