Last year, Professor Anne Kelso took over as director of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research in Influenza in Melbourne. Moving from Queensland early in 2007 to take up the new role in Melbourne was a return to old stamping ground for Kelso. She not only did her doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Sir Gustav Nossal, but also spent 10 years cementing her international reputation and research career in immunology at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

So, after 12 years in the subtropics at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and as director of the CRC for Vaccine Technology in Brisbane, the call of the plane trees and the chance to be part of a global health effort was too much.

In a plenary session on challenges in large-scale clinical research at the Clinical Research Excellence (CRX08) conference in Brisbane in August, Kelso will discuss the part her centre plays in the on-going global battle against influenza, both the seasonal bouts and the potential pandemic influenza that is likely to arise from avian flu.

The Commonwealth-funded collaborating centre in Melbourne is part of a global public health network for influenza surveillance, originally established by the WHO in 1947 to study the origins of epidemic and pandemic influenza strains, and to generate new virus strains for vaccine production. This network now comprises four WHO Collaborating Centres (Melbourne, London, Atlanta and Tokyo), and 112 national influenza centres in 80 countries around the world. Australia has three of these, in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. According to Kelso, it is probably the most extensive and advanced network known for monitoring a single pathogen.

The Australian flu centre employs around 14 people, all of whom work in some aspect of influenza surveillance, research or training. It was set up originally in 1992 by the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL), and in 2006 its management was handed over to Melbourne Health, and specifically to the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) division.

Already part of VIDRL operationally, the Influenza Centre will physically move to renovated facilities there in the near future, including new PC2 and PC3 laboratories, as well as specialised rooms for isolating human influenza viruses destined for human vaccines.