Lab focus: chemical biology and drug discovery

Our laboratory applies chemical biology and medical chemistry techniques to investigate and better understand biological processes that cause disease progression. Our goal is to translate the basic understanding of biological mechanisms into new therapeutics to treat cancers and infectious diseases, such as malaria.

Research interest 

Our laboratory focuses on chemical biology approaches at a basic research level to identify and understand new biological mechanisms. We also concentrate on harnessing medicinal chemistry methods to target biological processes with the aim to develop new small molecules therapeutics.

We have strong collaborations with researchers both within our institute and externally, across a variety of disciplines, including: 

• high throughput screening
• structural biology
• parasitology 
• oncology

Our team works closely with industry partners in several drug discovery programs dedicated to developing new therapeutics in the cancer and infectious disease fields.

Our laboratory has interests in:

• Design of peptidomimetic small molecules that mimic natural substrates to understand the role of aspartyl protease in the malaria parasite.
• Design of peptidomimetic small molecules to target SH2 domain proteins to investigate their role in cancer progression.
• Identification of the mechanism of action of small molecule antimalarials currently under optimisation in our laboratory.