The School of Chemistry is one of the founding departments of the University of
Birmingham, with the history going back for more than 100 years. Notably Sir Norman
Haworth did his important work on the synthesis of vitamin C here, for which he
later got the Nobel Prize. Nowadays in the healthcare arena there's a lot of exciting
fundamental research taking place in chemical biology, drug disovery, and diagnostics.
Luminescence is an extremely sensitive technique which can detect down to the
single molecule level. At Birmingham my research group works with lanthanide and
transition metal complexes which can detect light at a wide range of the spectrum from
the visible to the near-infrared. We decorate nano-sized particles, 13-100 nanometers,
so that we can put loads of labels on a single particle, making it quite luminescent.
These nano-sized labels have a very characteristic signal and can be detected
in biological tissue with high sensitivity. These nanoparticles can also be
functionalized with antibodies that are specific to recognise diseased tissue.
The versatility of our metals to be attached to surfaces allows the development of
diagnostic kits that can be used quite easily and flexibly, next to the patient, in a
clinic, so that early and quick diagnosis can be achieved within few minutes.
One of the research strands that I have my group focuses on
early stage drug discovery. So my group makes small organic molecules
which forms small compound libraries and screen them against a variety of
biological targets, and any molecules which come out as being active, we
describe these molecules as hits. We then work with our colleagues in Biosciences
to identify the targets, the potential protein targets, on which these molecules
are operating. One of the diseases that we're particularly interested in is
tuberculosis. This is a growing problem across the globe. Whilst we
do have treatment regimens there are growing incident rates
for multiple drug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant forms of the
disease. As a result we need to spend increasing focus on trying to find new
drugs acting upon new targets to treat these new forms of tuberculosis.
Our strategy is to develop technologies to transform community healthcare
and also to optimise treatments. If you go to a doctor they do a
very subjective analysis of the patient, and then based on that
subjective analysis standardised medicines are prescribed, but that does
not work for everybody. So to be able to do more objective analysis before you
give medicines is likely to reduce the recovery time and improve the quality of
health. We are trying to develop light-based sensors to do real-time monitoring
of biomolecules that are of significance in healthcare. It would empower individuals
to manage self-treatment. At the same time it would enable timely and accurate
diagnosis which is a first step towards providing right medicine and the right time.
Research in my group focuses on developing diagnostics for cancer.
So cancer diagnostics often works at the moment by people walk into their doctors
with a complaint: they don't feel well, maybe they have a lump that they're
worried about, and then the doctor is left treating the disease which is already
fairly well progressed. Survival rates are actually directly related to the stage
at which you diagnose the disease, so research in my lab is developing
molecular scale diagnostics. So what we do is put either handles onto the DNA so
that we can isolate specific bits of DNA, or we label the DNA using a fluorescent
tag, so we can put the DNA under a microscope and image its sequence
directly. So using these tools we're able to rapidly identify problems with the
genome. So the idea is that ultimately we have some kind of molecular
passport: a routine screen that happens every 5 or 10 years of your life once you're
past a certain age, once you're identified as being at risk of developing
a certain cancer, and that the test is simple and easy to implement in
a GP surgery to detect disease at the earliest possible stage.