Donor story: looking in the right direction

After decades of exploring  his own health challenges,  Tino Vescovi found a kindred  spirit in Dr Raffi Gugasyan  and his research into  healthy ageing.

There is a moment from childhood that Valentino Vescovi – known to friends and family as Tino – will never forget. 

He had arrived in Australia from Italy with his family just weeks before and grappled with the unfamiliar language. Then one afternoon, walking home from his schoolhouse in Victoria’s Central Highlands, he suddenly realised he had been thinking in English. English!

The joy of that breakthrough never left him. As a student, Tino was always at his happiest exploring how things worked and searching for new and better ways of doing things. After completing a master’s degree in science, he built a successful career in electronics research and development. 

Tino was born in a small village in the mountains to the north of Venice during World War II, and at the age of two, contracted diphtheria.

“For a couple of weeks, I was teetering between life and death. They didn’t know if I was going to make it,” he recalls. “As you can imagine, there weren’t many doctors around. All my Mum could do was pray.”

Tino survived, but the illness left him with damaged lungs, chronic bronchitis and, later, decades of debilitating migraines, following a course of powerful antibiotics.

In his 50s, he made changes to his diet, including taking a probiotic to help restore his gut health. Within days, his migraines ceased, and he has not had one since. He says the changes left him feeling healthier, more energetic and less prone to illness.

It’s little wonder, then, that Burnet’s research into inflammageing, led by Dr Raffi Gugasyan, caught Tino’s attention. Rather than accepting declining health as an inevitable part of ageing, Raffi and his team are exploring how changes in the immune system contribute to age-related illness, with the aim of helping more people stay healthier for longer.

“As you can imagine, there weren’t many doctors around. All my Mum could do was pray.”

To Tino, those are questions worth asking – and he was quick to make a contribution to Burnet’s healthy ageing research.

“Raffi is saying the immune system is critical, and we need to better understand how it works,” he says, animated by the similarities between his own health experiences and the knowledge being gathered by the Burnet team. “He’s looking in the right direction.”