This is an extended version of the interview seen in print

What’s a brief summary of your research?

Primarily we do organic synthesis related to exploring and understanding biology. There are various aspects that we focus on. One is looking for new antibacterials and the other is looking for new modulators of protein-protein interactions.

What led you to this area of research?

I’ve always been interested in organic chemistry as soon as I learnt it at school from the age of 14; it was the idea of making things and reaction mechanisms. Later at university, it was all so attractive making complex molecules but there needed to be a good reason to do it and, for me, that was the biological purpose. Make complex things that have an important biological property, rather than make complex products and just stick them in the freezer and never use them again.

Do you think that the situation with antibiotics is as dire as often portrayed?

It’s easy to come up with headlines that will capture the public’s imagination. It needs to be put into perspective, there was a world before antibiotics 100 years ago and we survived. However it would be a very different world if we had ineffective antibiotics. Surgery would be very much affected.

The UK is not seeing such a crisis compared to developing countries. India, for example, has many more problems with multidrug resistant organisms and that’s down to two reasons. Firstly, sanitation- half the population doesn’t have access to a flushing toilet. The other problem is that they have availability of every antibiotic over the counter without prescription. It’s a nightmare situation and it’s a global problem because people travel.

We’re lucky that vancomycin has remained largely effective in treating MRSA, though some strains are resistant. There is the potential for the equivalent of an AIDS epidemic and we won’t have the drugs to treat it. There is a need for new antibiotics and it hasn’t been addressed.

Why do you think it hasn’t been addressed?

The reason is less to do with the science and more to do with the economics. There are high regulatory hurdles for getting a drug to market, and for some cases the hurdles are so high as to not be feasible. Essentially, it rules out producing a new drug until the rules are changed. It makes no sense!

It’s being addressed with upfront public funding. In the US they’re funding early stage antibiotic research. There is also the US GAIN Act, where they’re giving antibiotics 5 years more on their patent life, so the companies get 5 years more exclusivity.  It’s a little bit shocking that it’s a solvable problem, it’s just the economics aren’t there, or at least haven’t been there for the past 50 years.

Why are protein-protein interactions of such interest to you?

We’re working on protein-protein interactions related to cancer. Particularly we’re focused on enzymes called protein kinases, which are targets for many anti-cancer drugs. Current anti-cancer drugs inhibit a particular site on the enzyme known as the ATP-active site. The problem is that these are similar for all protein kinases, and so the drugs will affect lots of other kinases. This is responsible for many side effects.  How does nature differentiate? Through protein-protein interactions and if you can inhibit these you can have greater selectivity and less side effects.