Skip to content
Scientific meeting

Photoactivatable metal complexes: exciting potential in biotechnology and medicine?

  • 20 - 21 June 2012, 09:00 - 17:00
Add to Calendar 06/20/12 09:00 AM 06/21/12 05:00 PM United Kingdom (GMT) Photoactivatable metal complexes: exciting potential in biotechnology and medicine? Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, MK16 9JJ
Back to events
Jump to
Overview Organisers Programme

Overview

Satellite meeting organised by Professor Peter J Sadler FRS, Professor Akhil R Chakravarty and Dr Nicola J Farrer.

Event details

Photoactivatable metal complexes present relatively unexplored potential for novel applications in biotechnology and medicine, ranging from functional imaging agents, diagnostic agents and biosensors, to target-selective photochemotherapeutic agents with low side-effects. But how can this potential be realised? This meeting will bring together photochemists, photophysicists, biotechnologists, medics and industrialists who will critically assess the prospects for rapid advances in this highly interdisciplinary and emerging new field.

This meeting was preceded by a related discussion meeting Photoactivatable metal complexes: from theory to therapy 18 - 19 June 2012.

Biographies of the organisers and speakers are available below and audio recordings are freely available.

Organisers

Professor Peter Sadler, University of Warwick, UK

Professor Peter Sadler, University of Warwick, UK

Peter Sadler obtained his BA, MA and DPhil at the University of Oxford. Subsequently he was a Medical Research Council Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and National Institute for Medical Research. From 1973-96 he was Lecturer, Reader and then Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, and from 1996-2007 Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. In June 2007 he took up a Chair in Chemistry at the University of Warwick. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and the Royal Society of London (FRS), a European Research Council Advanced Investigator, and Mok Hing Yiu Distinguished Visiting Professor in Chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are centred on the chemistry of metals in medicine.

Dr Nicola J Farrer, University of Warwick, UK

Dr Nicola J Farrer, University of Warwick, UK

Nicola Farrer received her degree (Natural Sciences, 2003) and subsequently her PhD (2007) from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral work involved developing readily ionisable phosphine ligands with a view to detecting catalytic intermediates by electrospray mass spectrometry, and was supervised by Prof. Brian Johnson (University of Cambridge), with the bulk of the analytical work undertaken in the lab of Dr. Scott McIndoe (University of Victoria, Canada). She returned to the UK to join the group of Professor Peter Sadler at the University of Warwick as a post-doctoral fellow in September 2007, working on one- and two-photon photoactivatable metal complexes for application as anti-cancer prodrugs. Her research interests also include multinuclear NMR spectroscopy and chemical applications of photonic crystal fibres. In 2010 she was awarded Chartered Chemist status by the Royal Society of Chemistry. She is currently taking a career break, following the birth of her son James in October 2010.

Professor Akhil R Chakravarty, Indian Institute of Science, India

Professor Akhil R Chakravarty, Indian Institute of Science, India

Akhil R Chakravarty received his PhD (1982) from the Calcutta University on a thesis titled “Aspects of the chemistry of ruthenium complexes” under the supervision of Professor Animesh Chakravorty at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Calcutta. He later joined Texas A&M University (USA) as a post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of Professor F A Cotton and studied bimetallic complexes having metal-metal multiple bonds. He joined Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, India, in 1985 as an assistant professor and currently is a Professor in the department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry.  He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc), Indian National Science Academy (FNA) and Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (FTWAS). He has received the S S Bhatnagar Award and is a J C Bose national fellow. He has guided 20 PhD students and published 200 research papers in peer reviewed journals. His research interests are primarily focused on the development of the chemistry of metal-based photocytotoxic agents using bio-essential 3d metal ions.

Schedule