Drug Discovery at McMaster
McMaster is among Canada's most research-active Universities, and holds a rank of 23rd in the world in clinical, preclinical, and health research according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. McMaster is home to numerous Research Centres and Institutes many of which are focused on innovative biomedical research that is relevant to drug discovery in a wide variety of thereapeutic areas.
The Magolan Laboratory is part of the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and the Faculty of Health Sciences. Our chemistry lab is surrounded by microbiology and biochemistry labs occupied by our colleagues in the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research (IIDR). Our area of expertise is organic synthetic chemistry. We have close ties with Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Chemical Biology Graduate Program but our immersion within McMaster's biomedical research environment is an important aspect of our ability to partner with experts across biological and clinical disciplines to pursue important drug discovery and development research projects.
Our primary interests lie in the search for novel antibiotics to treat drug-resistant microbial infections. The World Health Organization considers antibiotic-resistant infections to be “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.” Drug-resistant microbes result in more hospitalizations, raise the risks associated with surgery and cancer chemotherapy, and increasingly threaten public health in Canada and around the globe. In 2017, we joined the established team of experts of the IIDR who probe new antimicrobial strategies, develop assays, and screen large compound libraries to find new molecules that kill drug-resistant microbes. These molecules become the starting points for medicinal chemistry research and pre-clinical drug development efforts.
The Magolan Laboratory also partners in drug discovery-themed projects with researchers in a number of other therapeutic areas.
