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.

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.

This project will involve a reasonable amount of organic synthesis, as well as some host-guest binding studies and potentially some X-ray crystallography.

We hope that these will give interesting catalytic properties as we will be able to incorporate coordinatively unsaturated metal ions next to a well-defined 3D binding pocket. This will be studied in collaboration with the Colebatch group.

Our approach to more efficient synthesis uses domino reactions, which are spectacular events that assemble organic compounds quickly by forming many new covalent bonds in a single synthetic operation.

This project will explore additional opportunities for the efficient electrochemical modification of peptides, including through the use of novel “electrochemically-active” amino acids.

This project involves designing and developing new recognition motifs to assemble H-bonded frameworks, and using different interactions such as halogen bonding and chalcogen bonding to prepare frameworks.

This project will involve the synthesis of new organic and organometallic switches and characterization of their accessible states using various techniques including UV/vis/NIR/IR spectroelectrochemistry.

Structurally complex organic natural products are the basis of most of our medicines, and people trained in their
preparation are employed in discovery and process chemistry research units of pharmaceutical companies.

This project will synthesize foldamers decorated with emissive groups such as pyrene.

This project will explore the synthesis and chemistry of new group 6/group 9 mixed-metal clusters. The selectivity for certain types of catalysis will be explored in collaboration with the State Key Laboratory for Catalysis, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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.

Molecules that, in structural terms, go beyond the boundaries of what is currently known both improve our
understanding of fundamental science, and have the potential for exciting and important downstream applications.

This project will involve the synthesis and characterization of new hybrid materials at the interface between organometallic chemistry and nanoscience.

This project will explore the synthesis and characterization of new π-delocalizable oligomers and dendrimers at the interface between organic/organometallic chemistry and polymer science.