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More Pembroke news

Access Week 2025: From Local to Global

Designed to emulate 'a week in the life of an Oxford undergraduate', Access Week is an annual summer residential at Pembroke College. Select pupils from our target regions who have participated in our Access and Outreach programmes were invited to attend the residential, which took place this summer. We welcomed 120 pupils who participated in tutorials, seminars, mock interviews, academic trips, and much more.

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Reflections of a Recent Pembroke Graduate

Michaelmas term is fast approaching, which can only mean one thing – an onslaught of Freshers will be imminently arriving to Oxford and Pembroke. Starting university can be a big transition for anyone. We thought we’d ask one of our fresh graduates, Rohit Ghosh, to reflect on his time at Pembroke, looking all the way back to his own Freshers’ week.

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Former Pembroke Senior Associate Matthew Todd Releases Paper on Open Source Drug Discovery

NEWS |

Professor Matthew Todd, former Visiting Senior Associate at Pembroke, has co-authored a research paper entitled ‘Open Source Drug Discovery: Highly Potent Antimalarial Compounds Derived from the Tres Cantos Arylpyrroles‘.

Currently Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, Professor Todd held a Visiting Senior Associateship at Pembroke College from October 2014 to January 2015, where he delivered a seminar to academics, staff and students presenting his work on Open Source Drug Discovery.

The findings of the research paper, published in the journal ACS Central Science, demonstrate that an open source drug discovery system may be able to compete with the traditional pharmaceutical industry to deliver drugs required by patients. This system, based on sharing information in the public domain in real time, counters the existing model whereby those providing upfront investment require secrecy and guarantees to safeguard their financial return.

In article for The Conversation, the researchers explained: ‘Secrecy ruins the efficiency of the research process. Competing groups operate in ignorance of each other’s’ results, experts fail to talk to each other and there’s unnecessary duplication. There are groups pursuing projects known to others to be dead-ends.’

The research paper shows how the discovery of new medicines for malaria has been possible using open source principles. Further details of the findings are summarised here.

‘Our work moves into the messier, long-term phase of working with public domain information as a collective, and how we might move that towards new medicines using the efficiency benefits of open source’, explained Professor Todd.

‘I think this is what's needed as part of society's push towards new antibiotics, for example. Having a citable object hopefully makes such strategy conversations more productive: we know open source works in research, now how can we best translate it?’