The Institute for Biomolecular Science

The Institute for Biomolecular Science (IBS) brings together a large multidisciplinary team of chemists and biologists from the University of Wollongong 's Department of Chemistry and School of Biological Sciences . The Institute's program incorporates three key areas of research: antimicrobial agents, diseases of ageing, and cancer. Work on antimicrobial agents is particularly targeted at new antibacterials, antivirals and antimalarial agents, with the problem of antimicrobial drug resistance as a major focus.

The area of age-related diseases includes cataracts and neuro-degenerative diseases. The cancer-related research involves apoptosis (the controlled destruction of cells in terms of the growth and development of the disease), as well as new therapeutic strategies for breast and prostate cancers.

IBS's research programs are underpinned by crucial core expertise in drug discovery, design and synthesis, together with the detection and structural characterisation of biological targets. Long-term goals are to develop new drug leads to address problems of drug resistance in infectious disease and to tackle, in a new and more effective way, diseases associated with ageing.

Outsmarting the Superbugs

Drug-resistant bacteria, or superbugs, threaten to undermine decades of advances in modern medicine. For example, there has been a resurgence in the incidence of tuberculosis - there are around three million deaths a year - as well as other bacterial diseases such as those caused by Golden Staph (Staphylococcus aureus).

In tackling the superbug challenge, researchers at the IBS are using a combination of methods: looking to nature using bio-rational and chemo-rational approaches. A possible source of new antibacterials, for instance, is the significant defensive antimicrobial activity in molluscan (snail) egg masses. From another bio-rational perspective, researchers have found that Carissa lanceolata , a plant used traditionally by Indigenous Australians in Western Australia , Queensland and the Northern Territory to treat toothache, is active against Golden Staph. Using a combined bio-rational and chemo-rational approach, new antibacterial agents have also been found in medicinal plants from Lombok in Indonesia.

At the IBS, synthetic compounds are also being examined in an effort to overcome bacteria that are resistant to vancomycin, a traditional last line of therapeutic defence. A natural product from a micro-organism which was discovered in 1956, vancomycin has been used widely since 1958. It interferes with bacterial cell wall formation and the affected cells (with weak cell walls) burst under the osmotic pressure.

Vancomycin-resistant bacteria have mutated so that vancomycin cannot disrupt bacterial cell wall synthesis. In 1986 vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) were first detected in hospitals, and these VRE strains are spreading. Untreatable VRE infections can be life threatening. However, the molecular details of the changes in the resistant bacteria are known, and researchers at the IBS have designed and made new compounds to try to overcome the vancomycinresistant bacteria.

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Last reviewed: 16 February, 2007