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Development and mechanism of action of novel antimalarials

Project Type

Honours/Masters/PhD

Project details

Malaria is a devastating disease that causes around 450,000 deaths annually. No new class of antimalarial drug has entered the market in the last 15 years, resulting in the emergence of resistance against all clinically used drug classes. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new antimalarial clinical candidate drugs.

This project will utilise medicinal chemistry to optimise the antimalarial activity of recently identified classes of drug-like small molecules to achieve efficacy in laboratory models of malaria. The project also aims to employ complementary cutting-edge genetic and parasitologytechniques to discover and characterise the mechanism by which the novel antimalarials under development kill the malaria parasite. The overall goal is to develop lead candidates for pre-clinical development with industry partners.

About our research group

Our laboratory applies parasitology, chemical biology and medicinal 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 infectious diseases such as malaria.

Education pathways