Dr Daniel Conole has won a prestigious Sir Charles Hercus Health Research Fellowship. Daniel will relocate to the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre (ACSRC) in FMHS from Imperial College, London. He will establish a next generation, smart drug screening research programme centred around DNA encoded libraries. This new high throughput screening technology is faster, cheaper and more convenient than conventional methods. Initially this technique will be deployed to discover new chemical probes for an important class of deubiquitinase enzymes in cancer and inflammation, in collaboration with Professor Mike Waring (Newcastle, UK) and Dr Elton Zeqiraj (Leeds, UK). Further development will explore the ACSRC novel drug collection to increase productivity and success rates for drug discovery screens, in collaboration with Associate Professor Michael Hay.
Daniel completed his PhD in medicinal chemistry with Distinguished Professor Dame Margaret Brimble at the University of Auckland in 2013. He completed post-doctoral research at the ACSRC working with Distinguished Professor Sir Bill Denny and Associate Professor Brian Palmer developing anti-TB agents in conjunction with the Global Alliance for TB. Daniel moved to the UK and took up a post-doctoral positions at the University of Oxford and University College London. Since 2018, Daniel has worked with Professor Edward Tate at Imperial College, London, to better understand the importance of deubiquitinase enzymes in health and disease.