About us
Get to know our team and learn about the work we do at the Sussex Drug Discovery Centre.
Our aims
Our goal is to enable and accelerate drug discovery of novel therapeutics, with the specific focus in diseases with high unmet medical need. We build on our strength internally, drawing on the internationally recognised oncology research in Life Sciences and BSMS at Sussex. Our ambition is to use our collaborative environment to nurture knowledge exchange internally, for Sussex academics, and externally leading to academic or industrial partnerships and spin-out opportunities.
We are a training hub for future leaders in industry and academia, whilst developing the next generation of drug discovery scientists.
We plan to become a University of Sussex Centre of Excellence for academic driven drug discovery.
See our completed PhD projects.
What we do
The core aim of the Sussex Drug Discovery Centre is to deliver mature drug discovery assets for subsequent partnering and ongoing development. The group has adopted several strategies to achieve this:
- New approaches to old targets – many attractive and validated molecular mechanisms are yet to be targeted by medicines; the group has facilitated the development of novel molecules with the potential to reach the clinic in a number of disease areas.
- New approaches to new targets – collaborations with basic and clinical research scientists in Sussex and beyond has delivered novel and structurally-enabled targets to start discovery activities.
- New uses of old drugs – mechanistic, structure-activity relationships and phenotypic studies have been used with the aim of repurposing drugs for novel applications, notably in rare diseases.
- New chemical probes – delivery of novel chemical probes to assist target validation and screening library generation, through environmentally-sustainable chemistry (e.g. late-stage functionalisation and atom economical routes).