Funding
EPSRC CASE Competition Studentship in partnership with Exscentia Ltd, offering the award of fees, together with a tax-free maintenance grant of £19,237 and an additional Top-Up of £3,300 per year for 3.5 years. Training and support will also be provided.
Lead Supervisor’s full name & email address
Professor Adam Nelson a.s.nelson@leeds.ac.uk
Co-supervisor name(s)
Professor Steve Marsden s.p.marsden@leeds.ac.uk
Project summary
Drug discovery pipelines are driven by iterative cycles in which molecules are designed, synthesised, purified and tested. A remarkably limited toolkit of reactions dominates discovery, which has contributed to the historic uneven exploration of chemical space, and has tended to focus attention on molecules with sub-optimal properties. Many reactions that would be potentially valuable for drug discovery have recently emerged that could complement this established reaction toolkit.
The main hindrance in harnessing a broader reaction toolkit, such as molecular editing reactions, stems from insufficient knowledge of applicability across a range of substrates, and, thus, a low confidence in using these methods in a resource-pressured real-world context. Synthetic challenges can arise because bioactive molecules are typically more highly functionalised and relatively polar, and such substrates systematically perform less well in reactions that have been optimised using model (simple, commercially available) substrates. How, then, can the reaction toolkit be broadened to enable molecular editing reactions to be harnessed within drug discovery programmes.
The project is collaborative with Exscientia, an AI-enabled drug discovery company.
References
None
Please state your entry requirements plus any necessary or desired background
First or Upper Second Class UK Bachelor (Honours) or equivalent
Subject Area
Synthetic Chemistry, AI and Machine Learning
The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884 it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine and was renamed Yorkshire College.