Joanne Blanchfield

Biography

I completed my PhD at The University of Queensland in 1996 and then embarked on a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore working with Prof. Craig Townsend on the discovery of new biosynthetic pathways to β lactam antibiotics. I then worked at the Australian National University with Prof. Lew Mander on the synthesis of novel Gibberellin structures and finally moved to the School of Pharmacy at UQ working with Prof. Istvan Toth on drug development and delivery research. I was appointed to the SCMB academic staff in 2003.

Research Interest

My research broadly concerns drug and vaccine development and delivery. I currently have a collaborative project with Prof. Paul Burn in which we are designing and synthesising synthetic vaccine constructs against Staphylococcus aureus, HIV and HPV. I am particularly interested in the development of new CNS active drugs and the delivery of these across the blood brain barrier. I have a long standing collaboration with Prof. Istvan Toth targeted at developing new peptide based naturopathic pain modulating drugs. My group also has an interest in natural products chemistry, particularly in isolation and examination of the bioactive compounds from herbal extracts. In addition to elucidating the structures of the components of these extracts we also determine which compounds are likely to be absorbed across the GI tract. We also have a collaborative project looking at the behaviour of natural bile pigments and assessing these as potential heath supplements. Much of our work is organic solution and solid phase chemistry but we also endeavour to conduct the preliminary biological examination of our compounds in our laboratory. We use cell culture techniques, in particular the Caco-2 cell line, to study permeability and stability and we conduct in vivo biodistribution assays in rats.