Adrian Chaplin has been award one of this years Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prizes from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

'It appears that a series of catalysts developed in the Warwick Chemistry department have the ability to achieve the impossible: 'Impossible Ketone and Imine Reductions Made Possible by the Ruthenium Tethered Catalyst' reads the headline of the Johnson Matthey (JM) advert on the back of the April 2015 issue of Chemistry World. The tethered ruthenium catalysts described in the advert were first developed and reported by Professor Martin Wills and his group, and have since been developed extensively at Warwick and adopted by companies worldwide, including JM.

3 Academics in the Department have been awarded prestigious ERC starting grants with a total value of almost €5 million. Set up in 2007 by the EU, the European Research Council (ERC) is the first pan-European funding organisation for frontier research. It aims to stimulate scientific excellence in Europe by encouraging competition for funding between the very best, creative researchers of any nationality and age.

Dr Adrian Chaplin will develop new synthetic methodology for studying the interaction of alkanes with transition metals.
Dr Matthew Gibson will study mimics of antifreeze (glyco)proteins with the aim of improving cell cryopreservation.
Dr Józef Lewandowski will develop and apply approaches to investigate structural dynamics of large protein complexes by solid- and solution-state NMR.

These awards bring the total number of ERC-funded researches in the Department to 8, a clear testament to the internationally-leading nature of the research environment at Warwick.

Supramolecular guanosine-borate hydrogels have been made and characterised in a collaboration led by Jeff Davis (University of Maryland) with Andrew Marsh (Chemistry) and Steven Brown (Physics). The physiologically compatible gels, published in Journal of the American Chemical Society are featured in a Spotlight article. Lead author Gretchen Peters and Jeff Davis will visit Warwick again, 17-21 November to further explore applications of the materials.

A warm welcome to Professor Philip Chan, who joins the Department from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In partnership with the Monash-Warwick Alliance, Professor Chan will take up the role of Professor of Sustainable Chemistry. In this role, he will be pursuing the development of new green and sustainable catalytic strategies for complex molecule synthesis and their potential applications in the fields of natural products and functional materials synthesis, and drug discovery.

Helical arrays of small organic molecules around a core of Fe(II) ions act as highly potent and highly selective anticancer compounds. The work is published in Nature Chemistry.

Stereochemistry is a very important issue for pharmaceutical industry and can determine drug efficacy. Scott group metallohelices have been shown, in collaboration with Xiaogang Chu and co-workers at Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, China, to enantioselectively target and inhibit amyloid (Aβ) aggregation. This provides new insights into chiral inhibition of Aβ aggregation and opens a new avenue for design and screening of chiral agents as Aβ inhibitors against Alzheimer's disease. The work is published in J. Am. Chem. Soc.

Warwick Chemistry has played a lead role in securing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for 2 new Centres for Doctoral training, in Molecular Analytical Science and Diamond Science and Technology, as part of the recently announced UK's largest investment in postgraduate training in engineering and physical sciences. The Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts, announced the funding of over seventy new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), spread across 24 UK universities on 22nd November.

For further information please visit:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/university_of_warwick_takes_share_of_163350m_to_train_tomorrow146s_engineers_and_scientists1

http://onlinepressoffice.tnrcommunications.co.uk/universities-funding/video 

Scientists have discovered that a drug which increases the risk of sudden cardiac death interacts with mistranslated protein-coding genes present in heart muscle.

Scott group researchers report in Chemical Science (Open Access) that some of their helical metal flexicate complexes have high activity and selectivity against a range of cancer cell lines including cisplatin-resistant strains. The mechanism involves arresting cells in the G2/mitosis phase, and DNA binding is not necessarily involved.

The Gibson group have undertaken a detailed study into the ability of synthetic polymers to inhibit the growth of ice crystals - this is a fundmental process of incredible importance in biology (survival of extremophiles), medicine (cryoprotectection of cells/organs) and industry (preventing ice-induced damage). The Gibson group are pioneering the use of polymers as alternative to antifreeze proteins - Nature's cryoprotectants, using a combination of chemical, analytical, biological and computational methods

Read their latest paper here, in collaboration with R. Notman (CSC): http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm400217j

The Gibson Group publishes in Biomaterials Science on why certain (macro)molecules are capable of inhibiting ice crystal growth, inspired by antifeeze proteins.

The work, conducted in collaboration with Warwick Medical School provides insights into which structural features are essential for a (macro)molecule to inhibit ice crystal growth and why apparently similar compounds have opposing activity.

The ability to control ice crystal growth is a major technological challenge (anyone stuck at Heathrow or scraping their car...?) with many biotechnological applications.

Read the paper here