A personal tragedy was the catalyst for a biomedical student to return to study at The University of Western Australia in the hope that her research could save just one child's life and prevent another family experiencing the same pain.
Melanie Andrew lost 15-month-old daughter Mylee from what they originally believed was sudden unexplained death in childhood (SUDC) – the death of a child over the age of 12 months which remains unexplained after a thorough investigation and autopsy.
"We put her to bed a happy healthy little girl and in the morning we woke to every parent's worst nightmare, she had died sometime during the night," Ms Andrew said.
"It really shattered our world – you're always wondering if you've done something wrong or if you could've done something different."
Ms Andrew and her family began working with community service organisation Red Nose to help support families with bereavement.
"I wanted to make a difference and so started fundraising for Red Nose; I soon realised how hard it was to get funding for research and I could see SIDS/SUDC research had really declined because of this, I knew if I wanted to see a change I had to be the one to make that change," she said.
After several years the family discovered that when Mylee had died she had an undiagnosed immune condition that lead to her death.
As an undergraduate, in the women's health minor, Ms Andrew developed a research concept focused on bacterial infection in children who had died from sudden infant death syndrome.
"A bacterial link to sudden infant death syndrome or SUDC has been relatively understudied," Ms Andrew said.
"But we have found a lot of commonalties between infants who die of SIDS/SUDC, for example 80 per cent of cases had an upper respiratory tract infection at the time of death."
Ms Andrew is now a PhD student working at King Edward Memorial Hospital under the supervision of UWA Medical School's Associate Professor Matt Payne and Dr Lucy Furfaro, Professor Mark Nicol, from the School of Molecular Sciences and Associate Professor Demelza Ireland from the School of Biomedical Sciences, and the study is currently in recruitment phase.
"Our ultimate aim would be to detect biomarkers, so we can predict infants who are more vulnerable and then be able to implement preventive medicine," she said.
"I'm really excited to be working in this space because with my passion, and the amazing team of researchers behind me, I'm really confident that we're going to get some meaningful answers."
