Projects
Our goal is to develop an anti-malarial Trojan horse that will deliver a chemical payload to the malaria parasite that it cannot avoid, thus limiting the potential for resistance.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Organic chemistry
This project uses robotics and high-throughput platforms to accelerate chemoselective reaction development in small molecules and peptides, focusing on photochemical and electrochemical methods to create bioactive libraries for drug discovery.
Theme
- Catalysis
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Organic chemistry
This project will involve collaboration with industry partners (Beta Therapeutics) and partners within the Centre of Excellence in Peptide and Protein Science.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Physical and Biophysical Chemistry
This project is centered on developing an artificial living biomineralisation platform for self-reinforcing materials.
Theme
- Functional Materials and Interfaces
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Physical and Biophysical Chemistry
- Soft Matter
This project will capitalise on these achievements and explore biocompatible synthetic routes to various kinds of bicycles and their applications in drug discovery.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Organic chemistry
This project will screen numerous boronic acid derivatives available at the Research School of Chemistry (optional: computational screening of data banks). Screening hits will be modified to generate drug-like inhibitors with anti-dengue activity.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Organic chemistry
This project targets broad-spectrum antiviral drug development by designing and testing molecules that inhibit viral proteases—key enzymes in RNA virus replication—using covalent “warheads” like alpha-ketoamides to identify new therapeutic leads.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
This project will make further improvements to targeted gene mutagenesis and apply continuous molecular evolution to enhance specific binding of proteins to their respective targets.
This project aims to magnetically label proteins for new electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) experiments to study a protein’s structure and dynamics at low concentrations and in-cell.
Theme
- Physical and Biophysical Chemistry
This project develops or applies advanced spectroscopy techniques to study biomacromolecules, focusing on membrane proteins and bioactive matrices. Students will work with unique instruments for vibrational dichroism and polarised luminescence.
This project will explore additional opportunities for the efficient electrochemical modification of peptides, including through the use of novel “electrochemically-active” amino acids.
Theme
- Catalysis
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Organic chemistry
This project will involve collaboration with the ANU Our Health in Our Hands Grand Challenge teams in the College of Engineering & Computer Science and the Research School of Physics.
Theme
- Analytical Chemistry and Sensors
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Physical and Biophysical Chemistry
This project is centered on developing a new methodology that would allow the prediction of the behaviours of genetically engineered microbes in engineered living materials (ELMs).
Theme
- Functional Materials and Interfaces
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Physical and Biophysical Chemistry
- Soft Matter
This project will explore phage display (Nobel prize 2018) as the most robust approach and establish this technique at the Research School of Chemistry.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
This project will engineer new aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases to genetically encode un-natural amino acids with unusual chemical properties and apply them to produce valuable designer proteins for medicine, biotechnology and synthetic biology.
This project will involve collaboration with partners within the Centre of Excellence in Peptide and Protein Science.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Physical and Biophysical Chemistry
This project explores bottom-up design of engineered living materials by mimicking osmotic-swelling-driven growth in microbial biopolymer networks, aiming to enable autonomous 3D material expansion and cell transport for responsive, adaptive systems.
This is one of the big unsolved challenges in biochemistry: how to direct the tag to a single site, ideally inside cells in the presence of other proteins and cell metabolites. The project employs unnatural amino acids for the attachment of fluorophores, EPR tags and NMR tags.
Most proteins and enzymes "live" in solution. Like mechanical machines, their function depends on conformational changes. Using NMR spectroscopy in solution, we develop new methods to determine the movements and conformational changes of proteins, such as the COVID-19 main protease.
Theme
- Physical and Biophysical Chemistry
The Malins group is interested in several anti-cancer, antimalarial, and antibiotic peptides. 2023-2024 projects in this space will involve the chemical synthesis, structural modification, and biological evaluation of peptide leads as next-generation therapies.
Theme
- Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Development
- Organic chemistry