Professor Lara Malins
Professor Lara Malins is an organic and medicinal chemist at The Australian National University’s (ANU) Research School of Chemistry, where she leads a team of researchers developing the chemical tools and technologies needed to synthesise and optimise next-generation medicines.
With a rising prevalence of resistance to conventional small molecule treatments, there is an urgent need for new classes of medicines. Lara’s research focuses on harnessing the therapeutic capacity of peptides, a diverse class of bioactive compounds comprised of intricate sequences and arrangements of amino acid building blocks. Inspired by the structural and functional diversity of molecules from nature, including the gut microbiome and human host defense proteins, Lara’s group aims to refine nature’s templates, applying cutting-edge synthetic chemistry techniques to develop promising new therapeutic leads.
The Snow Fellowship will accelerate Lara’s work on peptide-based antibiotics and antimalarials and will support the development of new technologies to investigate peptide-based cancer therapies. Given the structural complexity of many promising peptide leads, chemical synthesis and optimisation often stands as a critical bottleneck to clinical progression. The Snow Medical Foundation’s investment in synthetic chemistry will expedite the production and evaluation of structurally diverse peptides to help fuel the drug discovery pipeline and ultimately, to enhance our ability to treat human disease.
Lara trained as a synthetic organic chemist and is motivated by her passion for building molecules. She completed a B.A. in chemistry at Boston University before relocating to the University of Sydney to undertake her PhD with Professor Richard Payne on the development of peptide ligation strategies. In 2015, Lara joined the laboratory of Professor Phil Baran at Scripps Research as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research fellow. She returned to Australia in November 2017 to start her independent academic career at the ANU, where her work has been generously supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2018), a Westpac Research Fellowship (2021), and several industry partnerships.
She is currently a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science and has been nationally and internationally recognised for outstanding research contributions, including as a recipient of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute’s Rennie Medal (2022) and the American Peptide Society’s Early Career Lectureship Award (2023). Lara’s dedication to science communication and research supervision have also been recognised through an Australian Institute of Policy & Science (AIPS) Young Tall Poppy Award (2019) and as a recipient of a Dean’s Commendation for Excellence in Research Supervision (2022).