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PEPTIDES AND PEPTIDE-DRUG CONJUGATES AS PROMISING THERAPEUTIC MODALITIES

Hosted by: AsPr. Brendan McMorran  

Abstract

Peptides are increasingly important pharmaceutical leads which exhibit promising bioactivities and safety profiles. Nonetheless, peptide-based drugs traditionally suffer from several liabilities, including poor bioavailability and susceptibility to proteolytic degradation, which can severely limit their utility as therapies. Strategies for the direct chemical and structural modification of peptide leads (e.g. cyclization, lipidation) have emerged as valuable approaches to enhance the therapeutic capacity of peptide-based drugs. 1 These targeted structural modifications are therefore in exceedingly high demand in the pharmaceutical industry. This talk will outline some of our lab’s recent additions to the toolbox of peptide modification chemistry, including strategies for the preparation of peptide-drug conjugates as targeted therapeutic agents. 2-4 We focus on methods which harness new modes of chemical reactivity and enable the modification of single amino acid residues within complex molecules—an approach which mirrors the precision of Nature’s enzymatic machinery for post-translational modifications. 

Biography

Lara Malins is a Professor at the Research School of Chemistry and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science (CIPPS). She completed her undergraduate studies at Boston University and her PhD at the University of Sydney with Professor Richard Payne. In 2015, Lara joined The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow, working in the laboratory of Professor Phil Baran. She returned to Australia in 2017 to begin her independent career at the Australian National University, where her group focuses on new synthetic methods for drug discovery, natural product synthesis, and chemical biology, including electrochemical and photochemical strategies for the modification of peptides. Her work is generously supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2024) and a prestigious Snow Medical Research Foundation Fellowship (2025).