Richard Charlesworth (University of New England) presented his work on changing how coeliac disease is diagnosed at the FameLab Australia 2018 National Final.

Richard’s focus is to improve the diagnosis of coeliac disease (CD). Currently the most conclusive form of testing for CD is based on examining tissue through a microscope, where subtle changes can be missed. The work involves the development of a novel test for CD, a gene array that can look at the expression of different genes simultaneously. Mathematical modelling of the data and predictive equations can diagnose CD with 96% accuracy.