The place to fast-track medicines that change lives

From lab bench to bedside

Ali and his team have created a platform to make and test millions of molecules called cyclic peptides, which have the potential to become innovative medicines, inside live mammalian cells. 

Using specialist tech, they engineer the cells to light up, or fluoresce, if the molecule they are testing stops a disease-causing protein within it from working. This way, they can quickly create a library of molecules that could potentially be part of new therapies. 

“So, for example, if you know protein X is a driver for pancreatic cancer, you can engineer a pancreatic cell to fluoresce if the function of protein X is stopped, by the molecule you are testing,” explains Ali.  

“The advantage of this method is that you can make and test a huge number of molecules very quickly, and because you are screening the molecules within a disease-relevant cell, you know they will function in cells in the body.” 

“Right from the start, the University has really backed me. I was able to have mammalian cell culture facilities built within the Chemistry department to further my research, which was unheard of at the time, in 2007. 

“Even to this day, there are major universities whose academics can’t get cell culture labs built; their students have to carry their samples a couple of miles down the road to a facility. Southampton seemed like the kind of institution that would go that extra mile and would understand what we were trying to achieve – and they have lived up to that,” says Ali. 

Curve Therapeutics is a great example of what’s possible when research, enterprise, and education work together, in a place where curiosity leads to discovery, discovery leads to innovation, and innovation leads to change.  

If, like Ali, you combine our specialist facilities with the opportunity to team up with other brilliant minds, the end results could be equally profound.