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 Professor Gregory Challis has been awarded The 2009 Gabor Medal by the Royal Society, the UK’s independent academy for science.

Greg Challis, Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry, received the medal and £1000 prize for his highly interdisciplinary work exploiting the genomics of Streptomyces coelicolor to identify new natural products and biosynthetic enzymes.

The silver gilt medal is named after Nobel Prize-winner Professor Dennis Gabor FRS and is awarded biennially for acknowledged distinction in interdisciplinary work between the life sciences and other disciplines.

Professor Challis said: “I am delighted that I have been selected to receive the 2009 Gabor Medal. Natural products continue to play important roles in society, for example as life-saving medicines, environmentally benign pesticides and drugs that enhance the quality of our daily lives. It is wonderful that the importance of ongoing research into natural products has been recognised by the Royal Society.

"As is often the case in modern science, many people contributed to the research recognised by this award. It has been my privilege to work with a talented team of postdoctoral researchers, PhD students and collaborators over the past eight years at Warwick and I am fortunate to have benefited from the support of my family, as well as many colleagues across the University. Warwick Chemistry has established a reputation for research excellence at the interface of Chemistry and Biology which involves numerous vibrant and dynamic research groups working in several different fields. It is gratifying that this has been recognised by the UK’s premier scientific society.”

Notes to editors

For more information, please contact Kelly Parkes-Harrison, Communications Officer, University of Warwick, 02476 150483, 07824 540863, k.e.parkes@warwick.ac.uk

Greg Challis wins the RSC Hickinbottom Award for his contributions to the "exploitation of genomics, for the discovery of novel bioactive natural products, and for mechanistic studies on enzymes that catalyse key steps in pathogenicity-conferring siderophore biosynthesis."

The University of Warwick is bringing forward by a year £2 million of its capital spending as part of a package of measures to assist the local Midlands economy.

The University has been able to do this thanks to a scheme by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to assist Universities to bring forward  capital projects that have been specially selected to have a positive effect on the local and national economy, in particular for the construction industry. The £2 million programme will refurbish some of the University's chemistry laboratories to create state of the art environments for students, which will be used for teaching and outreach to secondary schools. 

John Denham, Secretary of State for Higher Education, said:  

“I am delighted that Warwick University has been awarded almost £2m for refurbishment of chemistry teaching laboratories. This project will secure local jobs for those in vital building and construction work. 

“This funding is part of a wider Government initiative to bring forward £3bn of funding for important public sector projects and will bring real benefits to students and the public alike. Higher Education has an important role to play in supporting businesses, especially during the downturn.”

This is not the only action the University is taking to assist the economy.  Despite the current challenging economic conditions The University has also committed to press on with its overall £200 million pound capital spending programme which should also assist the construction industry. 

The University is also mindful that small local construction firms find difficulty in participating in tenders for large construction projects and will therefore soon also announce a simpler tender process that could create a roster of smaller local companies to work on range for smaller building work projects that would total several million pounds worth of business.  Once the details of the scheme have been finalised the University will also announce a special event for those companies to see the details of how the scheme will operate.The University has outlined some of its range of support for local businesses and people during these challenging economic times at: 

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/business/regionalsupport

For further information please contact: 

Peter Dunn, Press and Media Relations Manager, Communications Office,
University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL
024 76 523708 or 07767 655860 email: p.j.dunn@warwick.ac.uk

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found how a citric acid-based Achilles heel used by a pathogen that attacks the popular African Violet house plant could be exploited not just to save African Violets but also to provide a potentially effective treatment for Anthrax.The researchers examined how a chemical structure is assembled in a bacterial pathogen called Pectobacterium chrysanthemi (Dickya dadantii) that afflicts plants – particularly the African Violet which often appears in many homes as a decorative houseplant.Like many bacteria Pectobacterium chrysanthemi competes with its host for iron. Without a supply of this essential nutrient the bacterium cannot grow. The University of Warwick researchers Dr Nadia Kadi, Dr Daniel Oves-Costales, Dr Lijiang Song and Professor Gregory Challis worked with colleagues at St Andrews University to examine how a "siderophore", one of the key tools the bacterium uses to harvest iron is assembled. They discovered how an enzyme catalyst in the assembly of this particular siderophore – called achromobactin – binds citric acid, a vital iron-binding component of the structure. Their findings show that this chemical pathway could be blocked or inhibited to prevent the bacterium from harvesting iron, essentially starving it.

While an interesting piece of science in itself and of even more interest to owners of African Violet houseplants the Warwick research team found that this work also has major implications for the treatment of several virulent and even deadly mammalian infections including Anthrax.

View original image">A second piece of research conducted by three of the University of Warwick researchers (Dr Daniel Oves-Costales, Dr Lijiang Song and Professor Gregory L. Challis ) found that the deadly pathogen which causes Anthrax in humans uses an enzyme to incorporate citric acid into another siderophore that is very similar to the one used by the African Violet pathogen. The researchers showed that both enzymes recognise citric acid in the same way. This means a common strategy could be used to block both the Anthrax and African Violet pathogen siderophore synthesis pathways.

Professor Greg Challis from the University of Warwick said:

"Inhibiting this citric acid-based process could be even more effective in combating an anthrax infection than it would be in combating the African violet pathogen, because the African Violet pathogen has a second siderophore that can harvest iron from the host and could attempt to struggle on with just this, whereas the anthrax pathogen appears not to have such a back up mechanism."

Chemistry researchers at the University of Warwick have found that tiny nanoparticles could be twice as likely to stick to the interface of two non mixing liquids than previously believed. This opens up a range of new possibilities for the uses of nanoparticles in living cells, polymer composites, and high-tech foams, gels, and paints. The researchers are also working on ways of further artificially enhancing this new found sticking power.

In a paper entitled "Interaction of nanoparticles with ideal liquid-liquid interfaces" just published in Physical Review Letters the University of Warwick researchers reviewed molecular simulations of the interaction between a non-charged nanoparticle and an "ideal" liquid-liquid interface. They were surprised to find that very small nanoparticles (of around 1 to 2 nanometres) varied considerably in their simulated ability to stick to such interfaces from what was expected in the standard model.

 

The latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) confirms Warwick Chemistry as one of the best Chemistry Departments in the UK. An impressive 75% of its research activity was rated as either world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*) according to a panel of independent experts.  With all its academic staff submitted for the RAE, the Department can now confidently boast of excellence across all its research clusters.

A method for discovering entirely new career paths for existing clinical drugs is being exploited by start-up company Tangent Reprofiling Ltd., following a deal just signed between the company, PepTcell Limited, the University of Warwick and Warwick spin-out company a2sp Ltd.

The technique, developed at the University of Warwick, enables researchers to investigate potential new uses for drugs which are already approved for clinical use.

Tangent Reprofiling, set up as a subsidiary of the immunology company PepTcell, and based in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, has now acquired the intellectual property which will allow it to make use of the technique.

The idea of ‘reprofiling’ drugs is not unique to Tangent – perhaps the most famous example is the drug Viagra, which was originally developed to combat high blood pressure and angina. However this particular technique allows researchers to assess a wide landscape of current drugs in a cost and time efficient manner, using a combination of established chemical genomics techniques and proprietary chemistry.

Dr Suzanne Dilly, Tangent’s new CEO, explained, “Most drugs work by interacting with proteins in the body. By using the technology platform developed by a2sp Ltd, we can look for unexpected interactions between a drug and different proteins and then suggest potential new uses for that drug.

“One advantage of reprofiling drugs is that they have already gone through the rigorous tests required before a drug can be cleared for clinical use, a process which can take several years.”

A precious metal which has never before been used in a clinical setting is being developed as an anti-cancer agent by University of Warwick researchers. The metal, osmium, is closely related to platinum, which is widely used to treat cancers in the form of the drug cisplatin. Most famously, the cyclist Lance Armstrong was treated with cisplatin for testicular cancer.

Now the researchers, based in the Department of Chemistry, at the University of Warwick, are working closely with Warwick Ventures, the university’s technology transfer office, to seek partners to help develop the potential of osmium through more extensive biological tests. The team will be presenting their work on 9 December at the national university technology showcase event, Bioversity.

Professor Peter Sadler, of the Department of Chemistry, explained: "Although cisplatin has been proven to be a very successful treatment; it is not useful for all kinds of cancer. It is also quite a toxic therapy, which can produce side effects and, from a clinical point of view, cells can also become resistant to platinum."

Osmium, with its special chemical properties, offers a new potential solution to an unmet clinical need. It has shown huge promise in treating several different types of cancer cell, including ovarian and colon cancers which have been developed and tested in the laboratory. The metal also has another advantage in that it is a much cheaper alternative to platinum.

Peter Sadler was invited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA) to give the 2008-2009 Davison lecture in chemistry. His lecture was entitled:  Using metal coordination chemistry to design new medicines.

The Davison lecture was named after prof. Alan Davison, an Englishman who invented cardiolite and who spend most of his career at MIT, becoming emeritus in 2005.

“Cardiolite® is now the leading cardiac imaging agent in the world. It is the only heart imaging agent FDA-approved to non-invasively evaluate the heart’s pumping ability (function) and gauge the amount of blood flow to the heart muscle itself (perfusion). Cardiolite® topped $2 billion (USD) in cumulative sales in 2004, and is the single largest royalty earner in the entire MIT portfolio, providing even more revenue than the royalties associated with Professor John Sheehan’s patents describing synthetic penicillin.”