School of Chemistry Research

Professor Tim Albrecht: Much of the research here in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham is highly interdisciplinary, with collaborations within the school, with other Departments in the University, and in fact worldwide. A key area of our research is in designing new materials, and that includes new materials for drug delivery, new bio-polymers with designs inspired by nature, and even new materials for batteries.

Dr Tom Wilks: My research is about taking inspiration from nature to create advanced materials. So if you think about the structural diversity and the function that is present in natural systems, it's really impressive. We can think about a molecule like DNA, which is capable of some really amazing things on a structural level, and so what we can think about doing is either taking a molecule of DNA and trying to integrate it into a material, or we can think about taking the crucial parts out of that molecule and transplanting them into a material—and the way that we do that is using advanced polymerization techniques, and we then self-assemble those polymers into nanosized objects, which then form the basis of these advanced materials. And those materials have lots of potential applications in really important areas like drug delivery (so making drug molecules reach the place they need to be in the body); we can also think about applications and catalysis, and making tiny reactors that make particular molecules of high-value; and other applications such as energy storage and energy generation.

Professor Peter Slater: With the drive for new all-electric cars, there's an important need for high-power, lithium-ion batteries, and in terms of these batteries, our research is targeted in improving all the materials in these batteries, in order to give them higher energy density and make them safer. Lithium-ion batteries work by reversibly shuttling lithiums. So in charging the battery, we would take lithium's out to the cathode and insert it into our anode, and then as we discharge the battery, we would move the lithiums back. One of the issues, though, is if you try to remove too much lithium, you can get structure collapse, and this leads to a significant decrease in the performance of your battery. So one of the things we're trying to do is prepare more stable structures, so we can remove and re-intercalate more lithium, and hence get higher power.

Professor Jon Preece: I'm fundamentally a scientist who wants to make new materials that have function, in order to improve the performance, sustainability, and ecological impacts of everyday items that we use. To this end my group, in collaboration with Dr. Alex Robinson in the School of Chemical Engineering, have discovered an amazing new class of organic material that we have called the triphenoxazoles. These materials have the potential to make more efficient photovoltaics and light-emitting diode materials, and thus enabling a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. They're quite a unique group of materials, as they fluoresce, photoconduct, and are liquid-crystalline, all at the same time. This unique set of properties led us to spin out a company called ChromaTwist. This company will initially focus on modifying these materials into biological probes for use in biomedical imaging, and for use in security inks. And as a longer-term ambition, we will develop these materials for uses in organic photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes.

Chemistry Research: Healthcare

The School of Chemistry is one of the founding departments of the University of Birmingham, with the history going back for more than 100 years. Notably Sir Norman Haworth did his important work on the synthesis of vitamin C here, for which he later got the Nobel Prize. Nowadays in the healthcare arena there's a lot of exciting fundamental research taking place in chemical biology, drug discovery, and diagnostics.

Luminescent Nanoparticles for Imaging

Luminescence is an extremely sensitive technique which can detect down to the single molecule level. At Birmingham my research group works with lanthanide and transition metal complexes which can detect light at a wide range of the spectrum from the visible to the near-infrared. We decorate nano-sized particles, 13-100 nanometers, so that we can put loads of labels on a single particle, making it quite luminescent. These nano-sized labels have a very characteristic signal and can be detected in biological tissue with high sensitivity. These nanoparticles can also be functionalized with antibodies that are specific to recognise diseased tissue. The versatility of our metals to be attached to surfaces allows the development of diagnostic kits that can be used quite easily and flexibly, next to the patient, in a clinic, so that early and quick diagnosis can be achieved within few minutes.

Combatting Drug Resistance

One of the research strands that I have my group focuses on early stage drug discovery. So my group makes small organic molecules which forms small compound libraries and screen them against a variety of biological targets, and any molecules which come out as being active, we describe these molecules as hits. We then work with our colleagues in Biosciences to identify the targets, the potential protein targets, on which these molecules are operating. One of the diseases that we're particularly interested in is tuberculosis. This is a growing problem across the globe. Whilst we do have treatment regimens there are growing incident rates for multiple drug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant forms of the disease. As a result we need to spend increasing focus on trying to find new drugs acting upon new targets to treat these new forms of tuberculosis.

Optical Detection of Biomolecules

Our strategy is to develop technologies to transform community healthcare and also to optimise treatments. If you go to a doctor they do a very subjective analysis of the patient, and then based on that subjective analysis standardised medicines are prescribed, but that does not work for everybody. So to be able to do more objective analysis before you give medicines is likely to reduce the recovery time and improve the quality of health. We are trying to develop light-based sensors to do real-time monitoring of biomolecules that are of significance in healthcare. It would empower individuals to manage self-treatment. At the same time it would enable timely and accurate diagnosis which is a first step towards providing right medicine and the right time.

DNA-based Cancer Diagnostics

Research in my group focuses on developing diagnostics for cancer. So cancer diagnostics often works at the moment by people walk into their doctors with a complaint: they don't feel well, maybe they have a lump that they're worried about, and then the doctor is left treating the disease which is already fairly well progressed. Survival rates are actually directly related to the stage at which you diagnose the disease, so research in my lab is developing molecular scale diagnostics. So what we do is put either handles onto the DNA so that we can isolate specific bits of DNA, or we label the DNA using a fluorescent tag, so we can put the DNA under a microscope and image its sequence directly. So using these tools we're able to rapidly identify problems with the genome. So the idea is that ultimately we have some kind of molecular passport: a routine screen that happens every 5 or 10 years of your life once you're past a certain age, once you're identified as being at risk of developing a certain cancer, and that the test is simple and easy to implement in a GP surgery to detect disease at the earliest possible stage.