Lab profile

Diseases of the central nervous system (CNS) are of an enormous diversity. This provides a major challenge in the pharmacological treatment of brain disorders since they have a greater complexity than most other conditions. The discovery and development of new CNS drugs can be divided into several consecutive stages, which can vary in sequence.

The lab is primarily concerned with the medicinal chemistry aspects of drug discovery including the understanding of drug-protein and drug-binding site interactions in order to obtain structure-activity relationships of bioactive CNS molecules. Identification of structural motifs responsible for optimising activity and evaluating drug efficacy in animal models of disease allows the rationale design of more effective treatments for diseases of the brain. The purpose of these studies is to identify lead molecules that can be further developed into drug candidates for the treatment of various brain diseases.

We have generated a number of lead series which have been patent registration protected by the University of Sydney, with successful commercialisation outcomes achieved for one of these series.