New research laboratories in the Department of Chemistry will help to create medicines that are more effective in treating cancer and heart disease, as well as pesticides and fungicides that are more friendly to the environment. The laboratories were formally opened on Friday 26 January by Dr Barry Price, a former director of Glaxo-Wellcome plc, the country's largest pharmaceutical company.
The laboratories represent an investment by the University of more than one and half million, and have been built and equipped to a standard that is unsurpassed in any other university in the UK.
The laboratories will be used by Professor Stanley Roberts, an international authority on catalysts (agents which speed up chemical reactions), who was appointed to the University's Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry in 1995. His appointment confirmed the University of Liverpool as the largest academic research centre in catalysis in the UK.
Professor Roberts and his team of 21 researchers are working on a number of exciting developments. One group is working on the development of new drugs for the treatment of HIV, cancer and some forms of heart disease. This group is also trying to produce a man-made version of a compound found in a sponge which grows in the Indian Ocean. This compound - Spongistatin - is the most effective anti-cancer compound yet discovered, but is not available in sufficient quantities for clinical trials.
Another group is exploring the use of natural catalysts which are more environmentally friendly than those currently used by the chemical industry.
A third group has discovered natural catalysts that may have been involved in the creation of life on earth. These so-called 'primordial catalysts' are capable of spectacular chemistry which is also friendly to the environment. The catalysts have attracted a great deal of interest from industry and Professor Roberts has a leading position in the race to exploit them.
Professor Brian Heaton, head of the Department of Chemistry commented: 'The Department of Chemistry has an international reputation for its work on catalysts. It has a close working relationship with the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Surface Science and the Leverhulme Centre for Innovative Catalysis, which are all doing different aspects of outstanding work on catalysis. Professor Roberts' team is a perfect complement to the range of research expertise that we already have in the University and we are delighted that we have been able to provide him and his colleagues with state-of-the-art laboratories. A national centre for applied catalysis is soon to be set up by the Department of Trade and Industry as part of the Technology foresight programme and I am confident that we will be called upon to make a significant contribution to it'.
Professor Heaton expressed particular thanks to Kevin Doyle and
his colleagues in Buildings and Estates for 'pulling out all the
stops' and completing the project in less than four months.
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