Abstract: Our research focuses on the design of macromolecules, typically polymers, for application in the biomedical field. We use our understanding of synthetic chemistry to design (macro)molecular structures, which properties can be tuned at the molecular level. These systems are then applied to a number of biological and medical problems. This interdisciplinary approach, which combines synthetic chemistry, (bio)physics, biology and medicine, enables us to address some of the critical health problems faced by the modern world and to establish fundamentals in the growing area of nanomedicine and nanotherapeutics. This presentation will illustrate our approach by focusing on drug delivery and antimicrobial research. Drug delivery improves the therapeutic index of actives (small molecules drugs and nucleotides such as RNA in vaccines) by enabling targeted delivery to specific cells, whilst protecting the payloads from environment, and increasing circulation time. Antimicrobial resistance is a global challenge which requires immediate attention as the number of effective antibiotics is rapidly decreasing. The presentation will show how therapeutic materials can provide answers in these areas, whilst also establishing fundamental understandings of the biological mechanism involved.

Biography: Professor Sébastien Perrier graduated from the Ecole National Supèrieure de Chimie de Montpellier, France, in 1998. He undertook his PhD at the University of Warwick, England, in polymer chemistry, and spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Advances Macromolecular Design (University of New South Wales), Australia. He started his academic career at Leeds in 2002, then moved to the University of Sydney in 2007, and Warwick in 2013., Sébastien was appointed as the Monash-Warwick Alliance Chair in Polymer Chemistry, a joint appointment between the Chemistry Department and the Medical School at the University of Warwick, UK, and the Faculty of Pharmacy at Monash University, Australia. Sébastien’s team utilises macromolecular engineering to design functional nanostructured materials, with applications ranging from material science to nanotechnology and nanomedicine. He has published over 200 articles and book chapters, which have received over 20,000 citations (h-index 68), and supervised to date 43 PhD students and 30 postdoctoral fellows. He is a member of a variety of research council panels and on the editorial board of various international journals, and acts as Associate Editor of the RSC journal Polymer Chemistry. His recent awards include the Australian Academy of Science Le Fèvre Memorial Prize (2013), the Wolfson Merit Award (Royal Society, 2014), the Biomacromolecules / Macromolecules Young Investigator Award (ACS, 2014), the IUPAC / Samsung Young Polymer Scientist Award (IUPAC, 2014) and the MacroGroup UK Medal (2018).