Professor Chris Porter appointed Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor

Professor Chris Porter

7 November 2024

Monash University has announced the appointment of Professor Chris Porter, Director of the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), as a Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor.

The title of Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor is the most prestigious honour conferred on serving professors at Monash University and is only awarded to professors of exceptional distinction who have made high-level and sustained contributions to their discipline, the University and the community.

Throughout his tenure as Director of MIPS, which sits within Monash’s Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Professor Porter has worked tirelessly to deepen the quality and reach of the fundamental science based at MIPS and to translate those scientific breakthroughs into practical, commercial endpoints that deliver both better health outcomes and create new companies that grow the Australian biotechnology community.

Under Professor Porter’s vision and leadership, MIPS has excelled as a vehicle through which research discoveries can be translated into real-world impact. Major MIPS-led commercialisation and research translation projects have resulted in the creation of biotech companies including Cincera Septerna, Phrenix, Celesta and others.

Notably, Professor Porter himself is the inventor of more than 15 patent families, many of which have evolved into commercialisation deals, including a unique lymph targeted drug delivery platform ‘Glyph®’ that was initially licenced to Boston-based PureTech Health and successfully progressed through to Phase 2 clinical trials. The Glyph technology was recently spun out to establish Seaport Therapeutics, which has raised US$325 million in capital since launching in April 2024.

Through a more than 20-year collaboration with the Melbourne based biotech Starpharma, Professor Porter is also an inventor on the DEP^® dendrimer-based drug delivery technology. The DEP® delivery platform underpins Starphama’s pipeline of chemotherapeutic drugs that have demonstrated improvements in efficacy and tolerability in Phase 2 clinical trials.

The research programs at MIPS span innovations in drug target biology and early drug discovery through drug screening, medicinal chemistry and lead optimisation to novel drug delivery approaches and evaluation of the safe and effective use of medicines in the community. Major therapeutic foci include neuroscience and mental health, cardiovascular and metabolic disease and global health.

In recent years these research programs have supported the development of a range of major initiatives to support Australia’s growing biopharmaceutical ecosystem. These include MedChem Australia; ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centres for fragment-based drug design and cryo-electron microscopy of membrane proteins and multiple MIPS-led mRNA initiatives including the Victorian mRNA Innovation Hub, mRNA Core; the Monash-Moderna mRNA Quantitative Pharmacology Accelerator and Australia’s first National Centre for Biopharmaceutical Optimisation of mRNA Therapeutics (CORTx).

Notably, the expansion of MIPS research activities has led to establishment of an additional site for the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre at the Australian Synchrotron and the recent acquisition of a major new site on Royal Parade that will be developed to create a focal point for drug discovery translation.

A Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, Professor Porter’s own research group is one of the leading drug delivery groups worldwide, specialising in oral drug absorption, lymphatic transport and nanomedicine development. He has graduated more than 40 PhD students and mentored more than 50 post-doctoral fellows through his laboratory. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers, and the influence of his work is reflected in ~30,000 citations and multiple national and international recognitions.

Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Professor Arthur Christopoulos, FAA FAHMS, welcomed the well-deserved and highly prestigious recognition from the University.

“Chris is an outstanding and internationally respected leader, as well as an extremely generous mentor, who is committed to driving research quality at MIPS, an accolade that has been reflected in Monash’s long-standing reputation as one of the top Universities in the world for pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences education and research,” Professor Christopoulos said.

“His vision and leadership has been a driving force behind MIPS’ continued trajectory as one of Australia’s most successful biomedical research institutes, having created an environment enabling our scientists to flourish and, importantly, empowering them to think well beyond the lab. His contributions to the broader University have also been outstanding and sustained for decades; a key criterion for the bestowment of a Sir John Monash Distinguished Professorship.”

“On behalf of the Faculty, University and broader scientific community I would like to extend my warmest congratulations to Chris for this prestigious recognition of his incredible service to the biopharmaceutical sector, both within Australia and around the globe.”

To read more on the newly approved the appointments and reappointment, visit here.

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