Dundee Researchers Awarded MMV Project of the Year

Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has awarded researchers from the University of Dundee its “Project of the Year 2018” for their discovery work on developing compounds to inhibit an enzyme the malaria parasite uses in protein synthesis. MMV is a leading product development partnership (PDP) for discovering and developing new effective and affordable medicines to treat malaria.

The team at the Dundee’s Drug Discovery Unit, led by Professor Ian Gilbert, Professor Kevin Read and Dr Beatriz Baragaña, is working on a way to stop the malaria parasite making its own proteins, which is an effective way to kill the parasite.

Professor Gilbert said, “This is an exciting project, using information about the structure of the enzyme and computational chemistry to design potential new drugs. Whilst there is still a long way to go and many hurdles to overcome, the team has made great progress over the last year.”

“The Dundee team was awarded MMV Project of the Year 2018 as their work with MMV really represents a step forward from business-as-usual drug discovery,” said Dr Timothy Wells, MMV’s Chief Scientific Officer. “Having a greater understanding of the structure of the drug target has been like shining a bright light on the work to optimise the drug series – it means we can be really precise as we improve the selectivity and potency of the compounds.”

The award was presented to the team at a meeting of MMV’s Expert Scientific Advisory Committee in Madrid.

Some of the background to this work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1814685116).