Mental health, malaria and obesity in line of sight for National Drug Discovery Centre
Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) researcher Associate Professor Sheena McGowan and her team will lead one of three exciting research projects that have been awarded generous Australian Government subsidies to fast-track their discoveries into new medicines using the National Drug Discovery Centre (NDDC).
The centre provides researchers in Australia with access to the latest in advanced robotic high-throughput screening to enable patients to potentially benefit from novel treatments sooner.
The three new projects will focus on finding new treatments for a range of diseases including malaria, obesity and mental health disorders such as addiction and depression.
The subsidies cover 90 per cent of the cost of using the National Drug Discovery Centre, reducing the cost of a traditional screening campaign – normally upwards of $300,000 – to around $30,000–$45,000.
New therapies for patient treatment
Working closely with the NDDC, principal investigator Associate Professor Sheena McGowan and her team at Monash University aim to discover inhibitors of a critical malarial enzyme. Their novel approach offers a route to new antimalarial medicines, which are urgently needed to respond to the problem of emerging drug-resistance. Malaria infects more than 200 million people each year and the spread of drug-resistant parasites threatens the effectiveness of current treatments.
To find out more read the full article here, orginally published on The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) website.