Dr Luke Adams is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Centre for Fragment-Based Design (CFBD) based at Monash University. He has strong industry experience and through his role in the Centre plans to focus his research on industry applications for Fragment-based drug design.

Research Overview

In the CFBD, Luke’s research focuses on the development and application of the Centre’s in-house workflow towards the Rapid Elaboration of Fragments into Leads (REFiL) across a range of protein targets, most recently applied to Bromodomain-3 extra terminal (BRD3-ET) domain. 

Luke joined the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), Monash University, as a Research Fellow in Medicinal Chemistry over eight years ago. During this time he has focused on FBDD projects under the leadership of Professor Martin Scanlon. He has also worked on several projects including the synthesis of unnatural amino acids to serve predominantly as NMR based tools to study and understand the 3-dimensional structures of proteins in their native form or as complexes.

“Synthetic chemistry has a wide range of applications, but I have generally taken most satisfaction from working on drug discovery projects that may in the future have a benefit to society,” says Luke.

Latest Publications

View Dr Adams’ latest ORCID publication listing here.

Education

Luke completed both his undergraduate and PhD studies at the University of Bristol in the UK. His PhD involved a structure-based design project targeting a potential antibacterial target, aspartate semi-aldehyde dehydrogenase (ASA-DH) on the bacterial lysine pathway.

Following this, Luke spent two years in the US as a Postdoctoral Researcher within the lab of Professor Robert M. Williams looking at natural product synthesis and completed the racemic synthesis of brevianamide B. He also spent six years as a Research Chemist within industry across a range of sectors in the UK before relocating to Monash University.