Feature: Centre for Kinomics shakes up drug discovery

Phil Robinson (far right) and Adam McCluskey (far left) at the Ramaciotti Foundation awards.

It was undoubtedly an exceptional week for Adam McCluskey, Phillip Robinson and Roger Reddel. Following hot on the heels of the three receiving a $1 million prize from the Ramaciotti Foundation came another $3.1 million from the Australian Cancer Research Foundation (ACRF). $4.1 million in the space of a few days. “How’s that for a good week?” remarks Robinson.

This combined funding will allow them to realise a dream concocted by McCluskey and Robinson to create the world’s first centre focusing on the emerging field of kinomics. Once the centre is in full flight, they hope it’ll do nothing less than revolutionise the study of protein kinases and the drugs that target them. Or, in the words of McCluskey, they expect it’ll open ‘Pandora’s box’ for drug discovery.

Collaborative ventures

The Centre for Kinomics – or ‘ACRF Chemical Proteomics Centre for Kinomics supported by the Ramaciotti Foundation’, to go by its full title – is the product of more than a decade of fruitful collaboration between McCluskey and Robinson, and is an idea that lies at the intersection of their specialties.

Professor Phil Robinson is based at the Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) at Westmead in Sydney, which is run by Professor Roger Reddel. Robinson has spent nearly 30 years investigating proteins and signalling, particularly protein phosphorylation and protein kinases. His recent focus, in collaboration with McCluskey, has been on the role of kinases in controlling synaptic transmission.

Adam McCluskey, who is Professor in Chemistry at the University of Newcastle, has used the insights gained by Robinson’s research into the signalling mechanisms at work in synapses to design drugs that can modify the behaviour of these mechanisms. Over the past decade, the two have investigated a range of diseases but have recently focussed their efforts on epilepsy, a disorder where one in three sufferers gain no relief from existing drugs, and have targeted one particular protein, dynamin.

While this research has proved highly fruitful – with progress made towards a drug that could reduce seizure rates in epilepsy sufferers as well as other drugs that show promise in reducing tumour growth in some cancers – it’s in the labours of developing these drugs that Robinson and McCluskey came up with their latest brainstorm.

“One of the things that’s always been at the back of our minds is: If you give someone a drug, there’s going to be side effects, and that’s one of the things that slows the drug development pathway down immensely,” says McCluskey. “You’ve got to try to figure out exactly where it’s hitting: is it hitting a good target or is it hitting a bad target? And, being brutally honest, I don’t think there’s any simple cost-effective, rapid way of doing that.”

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