Monash University Professor Arthur Christopoulos has become the first Australian to win the prestigious John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology, a salute to his groundbreaking research into designing targeted new drugs with fewer side effects. The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics gives the award for original, outstanding research in pharmacology and/or experimental therapeutics by a researcher aged 45 or younger. Previous winners, such as Duke University’s Dr Robert Lefkowitz, have gone on to win Nobel prizes.
The 2012 award recognises Professor Christopoulos’s investigations of alternative drug recognition sites on G protein-coupled receptors in the human body. These receptor proteins play a role in virtually every biological process and most diseases, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and cancer.
Medications often rely on the receptors to achieve their effect, but Professor Christopoulos’s focus on particular allosteric sites on the receptors makes more targeted drugs possible. It would mean that a heart therapy, for example, would act only on the heart rather than on other parts of the body that contain the same receptors, and so side effects would be reduced. Professor Christopoulos will receive his award at the Experimental Biology conference in the US in April 2013.
