Grants from NHMRC and ARC are becoming a bit harder to come by in recent years, so we were very relieved to secure an Ideas Grant working in collaboration with Dr Alex Norman – a peptide chemist and existing collaborator with the group of Richard Payne in Chemistry here at USyd. The grant follows up on our initial work led by Karishma Patel in our lab and done in collaboration with Louise Walport, Toby Passioura and Hiroaki Suga to use RaPID mRNA display to design cyclic peptide inhibitors of BET bromodomains – a sought after drug target for a number of disorders.

In the new four-year project, we are hoping to further improve the specificity of these peptides (which already have great affinity) using different screening strategies, and also to address the issue of cell permeability that is a significant hurdle for many peptide-based drug leads.