Research Interests

The main focus of our team is to apply our medicinal chemistry skills to work on novel, previously unexplored cancer targets in collaboration with other research teams both internally in the ICR and externally.

Our overall goal in our drug discovery projects is to identify drug candidates which are suitable for clinical development. However, a more short term goal is to identify selective inhibitors of novel targets as tool compounds. These tool compounds are invaluable to deepen our understanding about the role of the target in cancer development and also which tumours are most affected by an inhibitor.

Current drug discovery projects in Medicinal Chemistry 4 include inhibitors of Nek kinases, an ubiquitin ligase, a DNA repair enzyme and most recently a histone modifying enzyme.

We have a keen interest in applying in silico methods to predict properties of chemical compounds and place a strong emphasis on these methods in all our drug discovery projects. In particular, we employ structure based design to identify and optimise lead compounds as exemplified in our recent publications in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry on inhibitors of the mitotic kinase Nek2.

We also explore the design and synthesis of constrained peptide mimetics to generate chemical tools. In addition, we frequently exploit fragment based drug discovery in collaboration with other teams.

Finally, we are keen to apply and develop modern synthetic methods in the context of our drug discovery methods, as illustrated by our recent application of the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling to the synthesis of azaindoles published in the Journal of Organic Chemistry.