 Let me introduce the stage Chiara Brookman from the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science. The title of Chiara's talk tonight is, This Is Your Brain on Drugs. Would you believe me if I told you that this was my brain on drugs? I suppose you might. But what if I told you that all of your brains were on drugs too? In fact, to coordinate activities all throughout your body, your cells produce drugs that act as signals to other cells. These signaling drugs give instructions for building new tissue, and they can also be used as medicine to help repair damaged tissue. I'm interested in repairing damaged brain tissue, and my research is all about getting these drugs into the brain. Normally, when you take drugs, they get into your bloodstream and from there target particular organs or injury sites. But that doesn't work for the brain. For some reason, your brain is quite picky about what chemicals it lets inside, and there's a barrier in place that stops most drugs from getting in. We can bypass this barrier with a direct injection, but these signaling drugs are short-term and they degrade quickly. So to keep the drugs working, you need a new injection every hour, and as cool as that looks, 10 out of 10 doctors agree that the fewer times you stab yourself in the brain, the better. Every injection causes a bit more damage and interferes with the healing process. But, as Mom always said, there's more to life than drugs. And in this case, healing brain cells also require structural support. They need to interpret their environment as a brain, so that structural support needs to be in the form of nanofibers. Just like those, you'd find between cells in healthy brain tissue. Now, there's simply no way of getting these nanofibers into the brain without surgery or an injection. But that's great for me, because it means I can use those nanofibers to carry in the drugs. Now, I've only got that one injection, so to make the most of it, I'm using nanofibers made of small pieces of proteins. The signaling drugs are also proteins, and on a molecular level, similar structures stick together. So the drugs stick to the nanofibers, keeping them in place so they don't degrade. And using this method, I've extended that one hour all the way to six weeks, enough time to build replacement brain tissue and connect it up with the rest of the brain. And, in case drugs weren't enough for you, I also want to fill damaged brains full of sugar. I've found that attaching long chains of sugar molecules to the drugs provides a nice, steady dose of the drug. Without the sugar, the drugs can detach from those nanofibers at random, but the sugar chains wrap around the nanofibers to really hold the drugs in place and reduce those random fluctuations by 60%. So the next time you're looking for a smooth stream of drugs into your brain, remember that this is for medicinal purposes only.