Imperial infection team wins GSK challenge to develop medicines of the future

Professor Shiranee Sriskandan and Dr James Pease

Professor Sriskandan and Dr Pease have together been selected as one of two winners of GSK's 2016 UK Golden Triangle Discovery Fast Track Challenge.

Sponsored by GSK’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) group, the competition’s winners will have the opportunity to collaborate with the pharmaceutical company to explore novel ideas that could become medicines of the future. 

Having won, Professor Shiranee Sriskandan and Dr James Pease will have access to GSK scientists and discovery resources, including high throughput screening with the company’s compound libraries. This will allow them to further investigate their winning concept, which aims to combat serious bacterial soft tissue infections by targeting virulence, rather than killing bacteria.

Professor of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine, Shiranee Sriskandan said "Screening compounds for inhibitors of bacterial virulence represents an important and novel advance in the approach to treating bacterial infection".  Her research at Imperial focuses on the potential mechanisms by which serious Gram-positive bacteria cause infections including necrotising fasciitis, peripartum sepsis and toxic shock.

"Evasion of the immune system by microbes is a fascinating area of biology and one which we must seek to understand if we are serious about controlling infections”, said Dr Pease, Reader in Leukocyte Biology. In the NHLI his group’s current research interests include aspects of chemokine biology, such as regulation and trafficking of receptors, their role in disease and also the efforts of microbes to circumvent the immune system.

Duncan Holmes, European Head of DPAc, said: "I am delighted to congratulate our winners of this year's UK Golden Triangle Challenge and we are looking forward to working with both teams.

"The Challenge has been extremely successful in identifying exciting new collaborative opportunities that may ultimately lead to innovative medicines to tackle unmet patient need. This programme has extended our ability to reach out and make contacts with leading academics."