Graduate Students and Academic Staff are invited to attend a talk on Open Source Drug Discovery given by Pembroke Visiting Senior Associate Matthew Todd. The talk will be followed by a drinks reception in the SCR Parlour.

Matthew Todd is an Associate Professor at the School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney and is a Visiting Senior Associate at Pembroke until January 2015.  His laboratory has applied open source principles to drug discovery and development in two areas.  The first project, run in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, discovered a new route to the drug of choice for the hundreds of millions of people at risk of schistosomiasis (Bilharzia).  The second project, in collaboration with the Medicines for Malaria Venture, is identifying new drugs for malaria based on starting points released by the pharmaceutical industry.  Several candidate medicines have been examined to date by a consortium of around 80 researchers and several potent molecules are now in the public domain.  This talk will highlight the challenges and benefits of such a patentless approach, and show that the consortia have been built with tools that are publicly available or open source; thus any community of researchers can work together in a similar way.

The topic will be of particular appeal to anyone with an interest in medicine, chemistry, global health, economics, law and public policy.

RSVP to nicola.barefield@pmb.ox.ac.uk