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 the discovery of novel therapeutics for diseases with high unmet medical need. As a Centre of Excellence for academic driven drug discovery, we build on the internationally recognised research in life sciences at Sussex.
For over 10 years, we have combined the expertise of colleagues from both industrial and academic backgrounds with industry-standard technologies and practices, and have a proven track-record of successfully-executed drug discovery projects.
Our collaborative environment nurtures knowledge exchange for academic and industrial partnerships and spin-out opportunities. We are also a training hub for the next generation of drug-discovery scientists, providing future leaders in industry and academia with vital exposure to the techniques and strategies that will equip them for success.
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).