Core expertise
Molecular design
Peptidomimetics
Small molecule screening libraries and chemoinformatics
Hit-to-lead and lead optimisation medicinal chemistry
Drug discovery in infectious disease (particularly neglected diseases including malaria) and Epigenetic modulation associated with cancer
Pre-clinical development of new drug candidates
Biography
Jonathan’s research interests include the discovery of new anti-parasitic compounds for the treatment of malaria and neglected diseases and the potential of computer-aided design techniques to generate compounds that can be used to treat diseases. He has more than 40 granted patents, representing 25 separate pharmaceutical inventions.
To invent and test new drug candidates, researchers use huge databases of chemical compounds and their characteristics, and Jonathan is interested in the design quality of these “HTS libraries.” He recently exposed an entire class of compounds that proved to be a dead end for research. They were still being widely used in drug development, resulting in a colossal waste of time and money.
A major journal changed submissions guidelines as a result, and Jonathan hopes other journals will follow suit. “Better awareness of these molecules and a few precautionary practices could, we estimate, save years of biomedical -research work and millions of dollars in wasted experiments,” he says.
