Welcome to the Oct 2007 edition of the Australasian Research Institute (ARI) newsletter. What a period of development we have been going through. With our focus on practical human research the ARI’s research activity and capacity has significantly expanded over the past few months.

To ensure we give our patients here at Sydney Adventist Hospital the benefit of receiving the most advanced treatments, the ARI has expanded to include a Clinical Trials Centre allowing us to offer (and monitor) newly developed medicines to our patients. We have also employed a number of new staff members to the team to support our work in clinical trials and medical research (see staff happenings a little later in this article).

As many of you will know research is usually a long and tedious process taking on average about 2 years for a project to be completed. As a new research centre we are excited about the results of some of our early projects that have either recently finished or are nearing completion. Look out for the brief review of our 2005 Adolescent health study in this report showing some interesting findings on the effect of specific food groups contrasted with exercise on health. We are also excited about the results of our project working on a novel method for makingfoods digestible for people with wheat intolerance. See the research update later in this article.