Understanding and Exploiting Drug Reactivity with Lipid Membranes.

It has recently become apparent that lipids are reactive towards drugs that partition into membranes.

The goals of this project are to understand the extent nature and consequences of this reactivity in biological membranes, and to engineer drugs to exploit this reactivity in order to traverse membrane barriers.

The strategies for achieving this is include the synthesis of fatty acids that can taken up into cells and incorporated into membrane lipids to enable the purification and detection of modified drugs, screening of these lipids in relevant cell lines, and the synthesis of modified drugs to induce detectable reactivity.

Synthetic fatty acids will also be incorporated into lipids and these lipids characterised in liposomes as model membrane systems.