Professor Tim Albrecht: The School of Chemistry is one of the founding departments of the University of Birmingham, with a history going back to more than 100 years. Notably, Sir Norman Haworth did his important work on the synthesis of vitamin C here, for which he later got the Nobel Prize. Nowadays, in the healthcare arena, there's a lot of exciting fundamental research taking place in chemical biology, drug discovery, and diagnostics.Professor Zoe Pikramenou: Luminescence is an extremely sensitive technique, which can detect down to the single molecule level. At Birmingham, my research group works with lanthanide and transition metal complexes, which can detect light at the wide range of the spectrum from the visible to the near-infrared. We decorate nano-sized particles 13-100 nanometers, so that we can put loads of labels in a single particle, making it quite luminescent. These nano-sized labels have a very characteristic signal and can be detected in biological tissue with high sensitivity. These nanoparticles can also be functionalized with antibodies that are specific to recognise diseased tissue. The versatility of our metals to be attached to surfaces allows the development of diagnostic kits that can be used quite easily and flexibly, next the patient in a clinic, so that early and quick diagnosis can be achieved within [a] few minutes.Dr Liam Cox: One of the research strands that I have in my group focuses on early-stage drug discovery. So, my group makes small organic molecules, which form small compound libraries, and screen them against a variety of biological targets; and any molecules which come out as being active, we describe these molecules as hits. We then work with our colleagues in Biosciences to identify the targets—the potential protein targets—on which these molecules are operating. One of the diseases that we're particularly interested in is tuberculosis. This is a growing problem across the globe. Whilst we do have treatment regimens, there are growing incident rates for multiple drug-resistant and extensively drug resistant forms of the disease. As a result, we need to spend increasing focus on trying to find new drugs acting upon new targets to treat these new forms of tuberculosis.Dr Ruchi Gupta: Our strategy is to develop technologies to transform community healthcare and also to optimize treatments. If you go to a doctor, they do a very subjective analysis of the patient, and then based on that subjective analysis, standardized medicines are prescribed, but that does not work for everybody. So to be able to do more objective analysis before you give medicines is likely to reduce the recovery time and improve the quality of health. We are trying to develop light-based sensors to do real-time monitoring of biomolecules that are of significance in healthcare. It would empower individuals to manage self-treatment. At the same time, it would enable timely and accurate diagnosis, which is a first step towards providing right medicine at the right time.Dr Rob Neely: Research in my group focuses on developing diagnostics for cancer. So cancer diagnostics often works at the moment by people walk into their doctors with a complaint—they don't feel well, maybe they have a lump that they're worried about—and then the doctor, you know, is left treating the disease which is already fairly well progressed. The survival rates are actually directly related to the stage at which you diagnose the disease, so research in my lab is developing molecular scale diagnostics. So what we do is put either handles onto the DNA so that we can isolate specific bits of DNA, or we label the DNA using a fluorescent tag, so we can put the DNA under a microscope and image its sequence directly. So using these tools, we are able to rapidly identify problems with the genome. So the idea is that ultimately we have some kind of molecular passport: a routine screen that happens every 5 or 10 years of your life, once you’re past a certain age, once you're identified as being at risk of developing a certain cancer, and that the test is simple and easy to implement in a GP surgery to detect disease at the earliest possible stage.
