MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY LED DISCOVERY OF NEW TREATMENTS FOR HUMAN AFRICAN TRYPANOSOMIASIS AND BETA-THALASSEMIA
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$636,524.00
Summary
I am a medicinal chemist interested in finding new treatments for sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease, and the blood diseases sickle cell anaemia and beta-thalassemia. After testing more than 80,000 compounds, we have discovered some promising starting points for drug discovery. These so-called “screening hits” are too weak to be useful but I hope to use my medicinal chemistry expertise to make these more potent, more selective, and hence therapeutically useful.
Discovery Of New And Better Treatments For Human African Trypanosomiasis
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$837,615.00
Summary
Sleeping sickness, or human African trypanosomiasis, is present in 36 countries where there are 60 million people at risk of infection, with 50,000-70,000 new cases and 48,000 deaths per annum. Transmitted by the bite of the tsetse fly, this disease is caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei, and without treatment, death is inevitable. We have discovered some compounds that weakly inhibit T.brucei and the aim of this project is to make them potent enough to become drug candidates.