WEHI New Medicines and Diagnostics Special Seminar hosted by Dr Brad Sleebs

A/Prof Christoph Nitsche

ARC Future Fellow – Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University (ANU)

Metal-Binding Peptides, Nanobodies and Miniproteins as Emerging Tools for Drug Discovery and Theranostics

L7W Seminar Room  | Bundoora Large Boardroom

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Including Q&A session

Please note this presentation will not be recorded

Biocompatible late-stage modifications of peptides directly enhance their metabolic stability, cell permeability and bioactivity. These strategies also enable integration with display technologies for direct screening of optimised peptides. Extending this concept to proteins facilitates their transformation into advanced theranostic agents. We developed methods using bismuth, a selective, stable and non-toxic metal, for peptide and protein modification. Bismuth enables efficient screening and selection of optimised peptides from both synthetic and genetically encoded libraries. Furthermore, we demonstrated that diagnostic and therapeutic metals such as bismuth, indium and gallium can be directly incorporated into single-domain antibodies (nanobodies), bypassing the need for bifunctional linkers.

Christoph Nitsche is Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He completed his PhD at Heidelberg University in 2014 and received a Feodor Lynen Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work at the ANU from 2015 to 2018. He received an ARC DECRA in 2019 and was appointed to a tenured faculty position at ANU in 2020. He is the recipient of the John Wade Award (2022), the Peter Schwerdtfeger Award (2022), the RSC Medicinal Chemistry Emerging Investigator Lectureship (2023), the Rennie Memorial Medal (2023), the Peter Andrews Award (2025) and the Tregear Award (2025). He was named the top Australian researcher in Medicinal Chemistry by ’The Australian’ for 2023, 2024 and 2025. His research program focuses on the biocompatible modification of peptides and proteins to advance drug discovery for infectious diseases and the development of theranostic agents.

All welcome!