…is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on with all the wisdom that experience can instil in us. – Hal Berland
This year has been filled with the challenges of sorting out the remaining placements and achievements such as thesis submissions at the Monash and Sydney nodes.
CFBD is slowly coming to an end but we can still look back on a number of achievements and experiences:
Our Centre Director was appointed as MedChem Theme Leader in March
We held a joint ITRP Career Day at Swinburne Uni in April
We took FBBD_DU and our Final Research Workshop to Brisbane in June
Brooke from the Monash node presented at BioMolecular Horizons in September
We co-hosted the international FBLD conference in Boston
Griffith CI Sally-Ann Poulsen received the 2024 Margaret Sheil Leadership Award in October
Let us carry forward this success as we enter the final year of CFBD. Wishing you all a restful break and a prosperous new year ahead.
The aim of the award is to recognise an outstanding female leader working in an area of a chemistry-related field. This includes academia, teaching, and the public or private sector. The award is given to female leaders who have helped to inspire and mentor junior female chemists and/or help to provide a more equitable workplace. The award consists of a medal and support for a lecture tour within Australia with the aim of inspiring the next generation. The Margaret Sheil Leadership Award was presented at this year’s RACI Annual Awards Dinner. Again, congratulations to Prof Sally-Ann Poulsen.
This year marks the official planned end date of the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Fragment-Based Design. We are looking back at five successful years of partnership with our researchers, collaborators and industry partners.
It has been quite an unusual 5 years with the pandemic interrupting our operations. Nevertheless, we managed to work on exciting projects.
It’s time to celebrate our achievements at the Final CFBD Forum. The Final Forum will be held together with the 5th Fragment-Based Drug Discovery Down Under Conference in sunny Brisbane. We are inviting all CFBD members to join us on 24 June at the UQ City Campus.
We are looking forward to welcoming everyone to Brisbane soon!
Congratulations to CFBD CI Professor Sally-Ann Poulsen, ECR Dr Louise Sternicki and the team at GRIDD for being the recipient of the prestigious 2023 Ramaciotti Biomedical Research Award.
This $1 million grant from the Ramaciotti Foundations is awarded every two years to a group or individual undertaking biomedical research. The award will fund the purchase and use of a first-in-Australia, cutting-edge new technology – native Charge Detection Mass Spectrometry ‘nCDMS’ that will enable characterisation of complex and large biomolecules and biomolecular interactions that cannot be analysed with existing infrastructure in Australia. The Ramaciotti Australian Native Mass Spectrometry Platform for Health Discoveries will be nationally accessible through the NCRIS Therapeutic Innovation Australia (TIA) platform. CFBD CI Professor Sally-Ann Poulsen was the lead investigator with the GRIDD team together with Professor Kathy Andrews, Frank Sainsbury, CFBD member Dr Louise Sternicki and Miaomiao Liu.
Dr Louise Sternicki was one of the recipients of the inaugural CFBD Travel Grant in 2022. In the following, she writes about her research visit to Arizona and to Florida.
2023 got off to an exciting start for me thanks to the CFBD travel grant that I received last year. At the end of the first week in January, I left for an almost 3-week trip to the US. I first headed to the deserts of Tucson, Arizona where I spent a week and a half in the lab of world-leading native mass spectrometry expert Associate Professor Michael Marty at The University of Arizona. Michael had visited GRIDD a few months prior, in November 2022, and this placement provided the opportunity to further build collaboration and follow up on some of the ideas discussed.
Whilst in the Marty Lab, I got hands-on experience with cutting-edge MS instrumentation and the emerging technology of charge detection native mass spectrometry. This technique is only available in a handful of labs worldwide and this placement gave me an opportunity to develop skills not currently in Australia and the ability to analyse my biomolecule samples with a technique that wasn’t possible back home. With this instrumentation and technique, I obtained novel data for new and existing collaborations that revealed new biological insights. The placement also allowed me to learn sample prep and native mass spectrometry methodologies for the analysis of membrane proteins – knowledge that will allow me to further the progress of my own research projects.
The Marty Lab was very welcoming both within and outside the lab. It is always insightful to visit another lab and see how things are done differently. I learnt so much in one week from many members of the group across everything mass spectrometry. I also got to eat lots of amazing Mexican, go hiking in the Arizonan desert amongst giant cacti, see snow on the mountains and visit the cold war missile museum to see a real (and thankfully deactivated!) nuclear missile in its silo.
After my research placement, I then travelled to St Pete Beach, Florida to attend the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Sanibel Conference on Membrane Proteins and their complexes. This conference had been delayed twice due to COVID, so everyone was very excited for the conference to finally go ahead in person – perhaps also because it was hosted at a beachside resort! Attending this conference was an amazing experience, learning about all the fantastic MS-based research occurring internationally, including getting to hear from Professor Dame Carol Robinson in person, and meeting leading MS researchers over the meal breaks. I was also fortunate enough to get the opportunity to chair one of the sessions during the conference. I came away from the meeting with many new ideas and further experience and knowledge for how to go about carrying these out, or the people to follow up with to achieve this. This was the first ASMS conference I had attended in person and the sense of community was incredibly welcoming. I will be looking out for further opportunities to attend their conferences in the coming years.
This opportunity would not have been possible without the award of the CFBD travel grant. Originally, I only intended on attending the conference, however, I was also awarded a Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery Director’s Circle Professional Development Award that provided me with further financial support that enabled me to include the research placement. Both experiences were incredibly valuable for my professional development and also created some great memories.
CFBD researchers are again invited to apply for a CFBD Travel Grant to the value of up to $3,500. This grant may be used for travel to a national or international conference, a visit to a partner organisation for research collaboration or a visit to a research laboratory to learn a new technique. The CFBD TravelGrant is an annual award.
The 2022 FBDD DU Conference proved to be a huge success for CFBD members. We heard fantastic presentations from the plenary speakers and fascinating stories from the presenters with a good number of Centre members represented. We saw brilliant posters and made new connections during the networking sessions. Adding to this, our members hit the jackpot with the FBDD DU presentation prizes. Congratulations to:
Louise Sternicki (Griffith) for winning the Best ECR Oral Presentation Award
Jeyan Osman (Monash) for winning the Best Student Presentation Award
Yildiz Tasdan (Monash) for winning the Student Presentation – Runner-Up Award
Max Lumetzberger (Monash) for winning the Best Poster Presentation Award
Evgenia Konstantinidou (Monash) for winning the Poster Presentation – Runner-Up Award
Another round of the CFBD Seminar Series is coming on 29 August 2022: Prof Marko Hyvönen will talk about the development of inhibitors for BRCA2:RAD51 interaction.
The Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) is the national professional body for chemists in industry, academia and government and is the primary voice of chemistry in Australia. Every five years the RACI holds a national Congress, with the RACI 2022 National Congress held from 3 to 8 July in Brisbane. This was a significant meeting (last held in 2017) with 1,148 people registered to attend, 615 speakers, 21 exhibitors, 12 sponsors and 325 poster presentations.
The CFBD members were heavily involved in the fabric of this significant meeting. CI Prof Sally-Ann Poulsen (Griffith Uni) was on the RACI2022 Congress Organising Committee and was Symposium Chair of the 4-day Medicinal Chemistry & Chemical Biology Symposium (the largest of all the Symposiums within the Congress). CI Prof Michael Kassiou (Uni Sydney) and Dr Louise Sternicki (Griffith Uni) were invited speakers, with Dr Luke Adams (Monash) and PhD Candidate Ashley Taylor (Monash) giving contributed talks and PhD Candidate Jamie Currie (Monash)- together showcasing the breadth of ARC CFBD research, while ARC CFBD Chief Investigators, ECRs and PhD candidates from the three universities and several of our industry partners were well represented. We were fortunate to have a catch-up dinner during the Congress – meeting face-2-face for the first time and a lot of laughs to be had. ‘The First Scientists’ artwork for the Congress is by Artist Steven Bekue.
Congratulations to Centre Affiliate Dr David Hilko (Griffith Uni) on the award of a Bridge and BridgeTech Industry Fellowship Placement through the MTPConnect QUT (Queensland University of Technology) David will work on site with GRIDD’s industry partner A/Prof Rakesh N. Veedu founder of SynGenis, a Western Australian based company that works in the exciting oligonucleotide research space.
The Bridge and BridgeTech Industry Fellowship Placement
The Bridge and BridgeTech Industry Fellowships, facilitated by QUT and funded by MTPConnect’s Researcher Exchange and Development within Industry (REDI) initiative for the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Fund, provide up to $10,000 to support the placement of participants and alumni of the Bridge Program and BridgeTech Program within industry. More on the program can be found here.
ARC Centre for Fragment-Based Design 