• Question: Will you work on finding different cures to different illnesses in the future or will you work on improving your cure?

    Asked by Caitlinr to Eleni, Hannah, Jenny, Oli, Steven on 14 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      Hi Caitlinr,

      If I have the option, I’d like to do both!

      In drug discovery there is always the challenge of improving what we already have, and is what I do on a daily basis.

      The disease I’m currently researching, called leishmaniasis, is caused by parasites. Similar parasites also cause different tropical diseases – things like Chagas disease or African sleeping sickness. Therefore, I’ve tested some of the compounds that work well against leishmania parasites against the parasites that cause these different diseases. For me this is really interesting, and I’ve already put hard work in to make the compounds so might as well test them against other types of parasites!

      Hannah

    • Photo: Steven Street

      Steven Street answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      Hi Caitlinr,

      Good question! One of the upsides of being a scientist is that your free to research whatever you want!

      I’ve really enjoyed working on anti cancer drugs for my PhD project, and I would like to continue researching it! However I would like to get more experience and live abroad for a few years, so I’ll probably switch to working on a different project. That could still be within cancer research though.

      If you wanted to then you could work on the same project for a while though… so it’s really up to you as to what you want to do! 🙂

      Steve

    • Photo: Jenny Batson

      Jenny Batson answered on 15 Nov 2016:

      Hi Caitlin
      There will always be work to do to improve our drugs but I’d like to make the best impact I can. Currently I’m officially focussed on eye disease but I’m also setting up the cancer work so I’ll probably hand eyes over to someone in a year or 2 and then move to cancer properly. It will be similar chemicals because they work by stopping blood vessel growth in both eye disease and cancer, but a different approach for different diseases!
      Jenny

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