Researcher awarded $8m to develop next-generation life-saving medical therapies

Close-up of Lara Malins - A chemist from The Australian National University (ANU) has been awarded a prestigious $8 million fellowship to help tackle some of the globe's most pressing health challenges, including antimicrobial resistance and cancer, and advance new life-saving medical therapies. Professor Lara Malins from the ANU Research School of Chemistry is one of two new Snow Medical Research Fellows for 2024. Her goal is to fine-tune naturally occurring chemical compounds and re-deploy them as powerful new therapies for human illnesses. Alongside her ANU team, Professor Malins hopes to unleash the therapeutic capacity of peptides, or short chains of amino-acids, a "largely untapped reservoir" when it comes to medicinal chemistry.  "As structural relatives of proteins, peptides are biological powerhouses, but while our understanding of them is growing, clinical progression has been limited due to the challenges in synthesising and optimising them in the lab," Professor Malins said.  "The specific compounds we'll be looking at have considerable potential as next-generation medicines - including peptide-based cancer therapies. This investment from the Snow Medical Research Foundation will help fuel the drug discovery pipeline and ultimately, enhance our ability to treat human disease."   Professor Malins will also use her fellowship to continue her work on new antimalarials and antibiotics.  "Nearly 100 years after the discovery of penicillin, we're on the brink of a 'post-antibiotic' era, with rising levels of bacteria resistant to even our last resort antibiotics," she said.  "Studies suggest that global antimicrobial resistance will lead to approximately 10 million deaths and an economic cost of $US100 trillion per year by 2050.