Emerging routes to new therapeutics: Highlights from winning Horizon Prize teams

With the growing complexity of diseases and an increasing need for effective, safe treatment, research into new therapeutics has the potential to address unmet medical needs across the globe. Collaborative, multidisciplinary research is key to solving these complex problems, involving researchers from all sectors including academia and industry. Those involved bring together an impressively diverse range of skills and expertise. 

The RSC’s new Horizon Prizes recognise groups, teams and collaborations for their recent discoveries or advances in the chemical sciences, with every team member who contributed to the work being recognised as part of the prize.

In this hour-long webinar, we hear from representatives from two Horizon Prize winning teams, who speak about their team’s research on the following topics:

A∙WOL antifilarial drug discovery team:  Lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis) and onchocerciasis (river blindness) cause severe disability and affect more than 117 million people globally. These tropical diseases are caused by long-lived filarial worms which rely on the bacteria Wolbachia. The team was the first to show that targeting Wolbachia with the doxycycline leads to the permanent sterilisation of adult female parasites and the death of the adult worm, with their collaborative research leading to a synthetic drug candidate.

In-cell organometallic redox catalysis:  The team developed the catalysts of redox reactions in cancer cells by synthetic organic complexes, showing that synthesised catalysts containing precious metals can catalyse reactions of biological importance and with control over the chirality of the products. The catalysts were also shown to function within cancer cells, and triggered high anticancer potency for ruthenium- and osmium-based catalysts.