Hello, I’m Alice and I joined Mat Todd’s group as a Postdoc just over a month ago. I have started working on the Malaria open source drug discovery project and this is the first of many posts to come, thanks for reading and please let me know your thoughts. My first task was to synthesise compound Sd a fairly unintimidating target, especially as Paul Ylioja has developed a robust synthesis of the required alcohol 1.

Jim Cronshaw from the Todd Laboratory at the University of Sydney here again for my two monthly update.

Previously, we found that we had no efficacy for the compounds tested in our  in vivo plasmodium berghei study. Until now we haven't had our pharmacokinetic to figure out why this was. We had previously found that OSM-S-5 (PMY 10-6/TCMDC-123812) is rapidly metabolised in mouse plasma, but that it is stable in human plasma.

Tomorrow we will be having an open chat with anyone who wants to pitch in about which compounds we should be making for the next round of testing. We've been talking about this for a while (phase 1, phase 2) and this the final call before we split some of the compounds into seperate jobs that teams can take on. In the mean time, I've made a few of the compounds we mentioned and I'm most of the way to a couple of others.