Professor Dame Margaret Brimble
Professor Dame Margaret Brimble is the Director of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Auckland where her research focuses on two major areas: the synthesis of natural products and peptide chemistry. Dame Brimble discovered the drug candidates trofinetide that is in phase 3 clinical trials for Rett Syndrome (Neuren) and NNZ2591 (autism). She is co-founder of the cancer immunotherapy company SapVax that has licensed her CLipPA peptide lipidation technology to develop self-adjuvanting peptide based cancer vaccines. Her peptide chemistry laboratory is New Zealand’s only laboratory accredited by Medsafe to manufacture peptides under cGMP for human clinical trial.
Dame Brimble studied at the University of Auckland, before being awarded a Commonweath Scholarship to complete her PhD at the University of Southampton. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, has received the Rutherford, Hector and MacDiarmid medals (Royal Society NZ) and the Marsden medal (NZ Association of scientists). She was awarded the Sosnovsky Award for Cancer Therapy and Natural Products award from the Royal Society of Chemistry. She is Past-President of IUPAC Organic and Bimolecular Division, Past-President of International Society of Heterocyclic Chemistry, Past-Chair of the Rutherford Foundation, Past-Chair PCB Marsden grant panel. She is an Associate-Editor for Organic Letters (Amercian Chemical Society), a member of the European Research Council Advanced Grants Panel, the Royal Society (London) Fellowship Selection Panel (Chemical Sciences), the Kiwinet return-on-science life sciences investment panel and a member of the Physical Sciences Panel for Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) Assessment.