Chemical biology and drug discovery of cell death

My research group, bringing together medicinal chemists and chemical biologists, aims at developing small molecules that:

– help us understand biological processes and
– can lead to future first-in-class medicines.

We are particularly interested in cellular pathways controlling cell death, which are corrupted in many diseases, including cancers and inflammatory conditions. Our approaches combines medicinal chemistry, structure based-drug design and cutting edge small molecule target identification approaches.

We are a highly multidisciplinary team and we collaborate with many colleagues across WEHI and beyond.

First-in-class medicines and discovery biology through chemistry

Purpose: To work as a multidisciplinary team that leverage medicinal chemistry and chemical biology to make discoveries and develop novel medicines.

My lab is recognised for the development and biological characterisation of of small molecules targeting the BCL-2 family of proteins, essential regulators of a cell death process called apoptosis which is deregulated in all cancers. In collaboration with structural biology colleagues, we use use structure-based drug design and medicinal chemistry to design novel anti-cancer medicines.

More recently we leveraged chemical biology approaches, such as chemical probe design and chemoproteomics, to discover small molecules that block, rather than induce, apoptosis and highlighted the role of a mitochondrial protein called VDCA2 in regulating this process.

We are also investigating a more recently discovered cell death pathway called necroptosis and developing novel inhibitors of this inflammatory form of cell death for the treatments of conditions such as ischemia reperfusion injuries or inflammatory conditions.