Congratulations: Dr Miaomiao Liu awarded NHMRC Investigator
Dr Liu’s Fellowship aims to develop mass spectrometry-based methods to identify or characterise new targets for drug discovery. The application of the methods in target identification will allow finding of unknown protein targets for bioactive compounds and will revolutionise and dramatically accelerate the drug discovery process. Furthermore, adapting to studying membrane proteins will result in finding novel therapeutic ligands that target membrane proteins, the most important class of drug targets.
Target ID
Target identification is crucial for rational drug design and is a current bottleneck for advancing bioactive compounds through the discovery pipeline. Dr Liu will use the power of native mass spectrometry (native MS) to establish and validate a disruptive new platform to elucidate targets of bioactive compounds by direct detection of protein-small molecule binding.
Ligand ID
The advent of high-throughput screening (HTS) has enabled successful unbiased drug-discovery and fostered the development of novel therapies. Membrane proteins (MP), such as transporters, ion channels and G protein–coupled receptor (GPCR) are of special interest as they comprise 22 % of the proteins encoded by the genome and are targeted by 60 % of the approved drugs available today.5 However, MPs represent only 2–3% of high-resolution structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). These statistics reflect a significant gap in analytical tools to characterize MP structure, function, and interactions, especially in the context of lipid bilayers.6 MPs are difficult to study in an isolated form, as they tend to lose essential cellular feature and may be deactivated. In this project, I aim to develop a universally applicable MS-based label free method that allows rapid screen for MPs.