New research grants totalling almost £400,000 will fund an interdisciplinary project in the new School of Life Sciences, intended to develop better and more accurate methods of drug delivery to target cells in the body.

Professor Steve Caddick (Chemistry) and Dr Dek Woolfson (Biochemistry) have been working together on an anti-cancer agent isolated from soil bacteria. The substance, Neocarzinostatin (NCS), which has already been used clinically in Japan, actually comprises two components: a small active chemical ingredient and a stabilising protein.

The active chemical component, says Steve, has a beautiful molecular structure. It is a 'molecular contortionist' and these contortions lead to strain and instability; this gives NCS its biological activity.

How is the contorted active chemical protected from premature release? "One possibility," says Dek, "is that the protein acts as a molecular 'chaperone' that keeps the highly active and potentially dangerous molecule out of mischief until it reaches its site of action - possibly a cancer cell."

The new funding will enable Steve and Dek to turn their attention to applications. In particular, they are interested in how 'promiscuous' the protein might be in accepting other drug molecules and whether it can be encouraged to deliver a variety of drugs to different target cells.

This work could eventually find use in the treatment of diseases such as cancer because it should allow reactive drugs to be stabilised and to make them more specific. However these are still a long way off and applications of these fundamental studies may be seen more rapidly in non-clinical work.

The funding from the EPSRC and BBSRC has not come easily, and much has depended on collaborative work here at Sussex and with the MRC's Biological NMR Spectroscopy Centre at Mill Hill.

Sussex graduate student Mick Urbaniak has played a significant part in this collaborative work and has found that the protein can accommodate a range of non-natural chemicals, some of which could provide the basis for recruiting other drugs.

"Mick's preliminary work is really exciting," say Steve and Dek, "because it shows that we can use the promiscuity of the protein for applications such as biosensing, drug delivery and even chemical synthesis." Mick's findings have recently been published in the journal Biochemistry.

With the new funding and strengthened links between Chemistry and Biochemistry, the two investigators expect this to be the first of many such interdisciplinary projects in the new School of Life Sciences.

As they point out, the considerable potential at the boundary of their two disciplines could not have been realised without 'seed-corn' funding through the Centre for Biomolecular Design and Drug Development, which was established by the University in 1996 thanks to the vision of its director, Professor Douglas Young.