Drugs and Bugs: The Fight for Global Health

Deadly infections are rising worldwide, driven by antimicrobial resistance. You will hear stories about when treatable infection becomes untreatable, both on your doorstep and around the world. You’ll learn about how important infection tests are, but how there is so much more to answer then just if the tests works or not. This includes examples from research done with colleagues in Kenya, emphasising the realities of laboratory capacity and supply chain issues. I’ll share insights from a parliamentary internship, highlighting the translation of science into practical, comprehensible policy insights, and how language, metaphors and even comics can shape public understanding. 

The cells in our body contain a recycling system – this system uses biochemical labels to trigger the destruction of proteins and maintain a stable environment. Proteins can act as important signalling molecules in the body, but also as drivers of diseases such as cancer. What if we could force the body to recycle troublesome proteins, using medicines? My work develops Targeted Protein Degradation (TPD) strategies to tackle disease proteins, by bringing together the cells machinery to label disease drivers for destruction inside the cell, through the action of novel drugs.

Over time, medicines can stop working against malaria, so how do we stay one step ahead? One idea is to target different parts of the parasite, but how do we know which parts to go after? My research aims to answer this question by building special chemical tools that can switch on or off specific parts of the parasite, so we can find out what they do and whether they are good targets for medicines. In this talk, I’ll show you how we design these tools and how they can help us better understand malaria.

Malaria can appear to be a solved problem — prevented with tablets, bed nets, and even new vaccines. In reality, it remains a major global health challenge, responsible for over 600,000 deaths each year. Current treatments are not always safe or reliable, and the parasite is increasingly developing resistance to even our most effective drugs. In this talk, we will explore why new antimalarial medicines are urgently needed, and how scientists discover and develop the next generation of life-saving treatments.