Margaret Brimble

Biography

  Margaret Brimble is Director of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Auckland. Amongst many national and international honours she has been appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and received the Rutherford, Hector and MacDiarmid medals from the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Royal Society of Chemistry Natural Products Chemistry Award, the RACI Adrien Albert Award for medicinal chemistry, the IUPAC Distinguished Woman in Chemistry/Chemical Engineering Award and was named the 2007 L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Laureate (Asia-Pacific). She is President of the IUPAC Organic and Bimolecular Division, Chair of the Rutherford Foundation and a member of the European Research Council Advanced Grants Panel. She is past-President of the International Society of Heterocyclic Chemistry and former Chair of the RSNZ Marsden Fund Physics, Chemistry and Biochemistry panel. Margaret’s team discovered the drug NNZ2566 for Neuren Pharmaceuticals Ltd (ASX) that was successful in phase 2 clinical trials for Rett syndrome and Fragile X Syndrome. NNZ2566 has been named trofinetide by the WHO and has been granted orphan drug and fast track status for these indications. Trofinetide is also currently in phase 2 clinical trials for traumatic brain injury (i.v.) and concussion (oral). Margaret’s peptide chemistry laboratory is New Zealand’s only laboratory accredited by Medsafe to manufacture peptides under cGMP for human clinical trial, and her team has manufactured five such peptides for the human clinical trial of a melanoma vaccine.  

Research Interest

 Cancer and Oncology