Brendon Monahan is Director of MedChem Australia and is based at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS). In partnership with the Nodes and project providers, Brendon is responsible for the overall operation of MedChem Australia. Previously, Brendon was the Chief Scientific Officer of Canthera Discovery, formerly the Cancer Therapeutics CRC (CTx). Brendon is passionate about translating innovative research discoveries into potential new therapies and has extensive experience establishing collaborative multidisciplinary drug discovery teams which have delivered successful outcomes. Brendon has led or contributed to many licensed drug discovery programs across epigenetic, kinase, RNA modulation, and immuno-oncology targets, with two assets currently in active clinical trials and others in preclinical development. Brendon was Project Leader for two chromatin modifying targets licensed to Pfizer in a deal worth $20M upfront, US$460M in potential development and sales milestone payments, plus royalties. One of those projects, KAT6A, is currently in Phase I clinical trials for advanced or metastatic solid tumours.

Susan Charman is Professor and Director of the Centre for Drug Candidate Optimisation (CDCO), Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) and leads the DMPK capability for MedChem Australia. She has worked in the area of biopharmaceutical drug candidate optimisation for more than 25 years. She has significant experience working with multidisciplinary drug discovery teams, providing data in support of medicinal chemistry and biology to guide compound design and progression. She leads a team of 22 postdoctoral and research scientists and has established robust, industry-standard platforms that underpin a successful model for collaborative, translational research within a university environment. The CDCO provides expertise and infrastructure in physicochemical properties, drug absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination (ADME) characteristics and in vivo drug absorption and disposition. Optimisation of ADME and pharmacokinetic properties is essential for new drug candidates to ensure safe and efficacious exposure profiles and convenient dosing regimens for patients. Her research group has contributed to drug discovery programs that have progressed more than 42 new drug candidates to human clinical trials in a range of disease areas.

Paul Stupple is a medicinal chemist with more than 20 years of experience in the global pharmaceutical industry and academia. He is Head of the MedChem Australia Monash node and also leads the Australian Translational Medicinal Chemistry Facility at MIPS. He has an outstanding track record of advancing projects to clinical development through progression of effective design strategies, development of exceptional teams and an enthusiastic approach to building strong multidisciplinary relationships. He has a DPhil in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and spent the first decade of his career at Pfizer where he ultimately led multidisciplinary teams which delivered 6 clinical candidates of which 4 advanced to Phase I clinical trials and 2 to Phase II. Following a subsequent move to Australia, initially to WEHI, then Monash University, he led the Medicinal Chemistry program at the Cancer Therapeutics CRC (CTx), later rebranded to Canthera Discovery. Through this role he led a chemistry program that resulted in two of the largest preclinical licencing agreements ever made in Australia. Namely PRMT5 inhibitors licensed to Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD) in 2016, and chromatin modifying assets licensed to Pfizer in 2018, from which its lead compound was nominated as a development candidate and is currently undergoing Phase I clinical trials.

Michael Kassiou is Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Head of MedChem Australia University of Sydney Node. He is the academic Director of the Drug Discovery Initiative at the University of Sydney and also serves as Academic Lead of the NSW Organoid Innovation Centre. He has significant experience in the discovery and development of small molecules for the study and treatment of CNS diseases and has been involved in several first-in-human studies. He has authored more than 310 peer-reviewed publications and co-founded spin-off companies, including Kinoxis Therapeutics who recently signed a $273M partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim to investigate drugs that treat aggression and social withdrawal in people with a range of psychiatric disorders, and ProKardia Pty Ltd who have been awarded $1.2M from the TTRA program and CUREator to facilitate first-in-human studies of small molecule inhibitors of inflammation. His contributions have been recognised through several awards such as the Australian Museum Eureka Award for Leadership in Science and Innovation, the HG Smith Memorial Medal, the RACI Applied Research Award, and the Adrien Albert Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Jeff Mitchell is the Head of WEHI’s National Drug Discovery Centre (NDDC), which specialises in high-throughput screening to discover new compounds with potential to treat human disease. He is the co-head of the MedChem Australia WEHI node. Jeff is an accomplished medicinal chemist, with over two decades of experience in small molecule drug discovery and a demonstrated track record of collaboration with the biomedical research community. Before joining WEHI, he was a Principal Research Scientist at Biota Pharmaceuticals, where he played a critical role on a number of small molecule anti-infective projects. Among these were a human orthopneumovirus program, which progressed from hit to Phase 2 clinical trials in partnership with MedImmune and AstraZeneca, and a Clostridium difficile program that was successfully licensed to Taxis Pharmaceuticals. Jeff has extensive experience in designing small molecule screening libraries and holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of Melbourne.

Guillaume Lessene is a medicinal chemist co-head of the MedChem Australia WEHI node. He is the head of the New Medicines and Advanced Technologies Theme, at WEHI which comprises basic research driven by structural and chemical biology, translation of basic discoveries into new medicines together with clinical research, and cutting-edge technologies. His major research focus has been the development of small molecules that target apoptotic and necroptotic cell death pathways. His work targeting the BCL-2 family of proteins for cancer therapy formed the basis of a major collaboration between WEHI and two pharmaceutical companies, Genentech and AbbVie. This tripartite collaboration led to the development of venetoclax, the first BH3-mimetic approved by the US Federal Drug Agency (FDA) for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL).

Olivia Ross-Hurst the MedChem Australia Operations Manager, based at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS) in Melbourne. Olivia is an experienced operations manager with a background managing complex multi-partner collaborative research and public health programmes. Prior to moving to Melbourne in 2023, Olivia worked at UK thinktank The Health Foundation, managing a portfolio of analytical workstreams supporting research and policy in health and social care, focusing in particular on tackling healthcare inequalities. Prior to this, Olivia was responsible for the management of several large-scale infectious disease programmes at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), including Ebola vaccine projects EBOVAC 1 and 2 trials, the substantial HIV prevention trial PopART, and the tuberculosis modelling and analysis consortium, TB-MAC.