Introduction

[fantasy121]

Hello everyone. My name is Hung and I'm a PhD student at the University of Sydney. My current research interests are in the drug discovery for the fungal disease mycetoma and effective communication of scientific information.

[fantasy121]

At the moment I am synthesising analogues for the molecule Fenarimol. Fenarimol and its analogues are tertiary alcohols that consist of 3 aromatic rings with varying degrees of substitution. Fenarimol analogues showed promising initial effectiveness against eumycetoma (that's the fungal version of mycetoma) through extensive screening done by Asst Prof van de Sande's team. I'm interested in exploring how changes in different parts of the fenarimol analogue molecule would affect its activity against eumycetoma.

[fantasy121]

During my Honours project under the supervision of Prof Matthew Todd @mattodd, some of the motifs I explored include varying the substituents attached to the rings, changing the central alcohol and modifications to the piperazine rings. My Honours labnote can be accessed from here From further biological evaluation of fenarimol analogues against eumycetoma, Dr Benjamin Perry from DNDi discovered a trend that suggests the relationship between a low LogD value and high in vivo efficacy (LogD correlates to a molecule's hydrophilicity, lower LogD equals more hydrophilic).

[fantasy121]

The drug discovery for eumycetoma forms part of my PhD project. Currently I'm exploring the ring locks and aliphatic motifs. My progress can be found in my notebook here. I work under the joint supervision of Dr. Alice Motion @alintheopen and Prof. Peter Rutledge. I'm also contributing to the Open Source Mycetoma collaboration network