Beyond the group's work on understanding the processes of glycobiology within the cell, we also have active projects ongoing to generate drug-like compounds. Furthermore, novel chemical tools are being utilised to enhance our ability to study the wider function of glycans.

Fragment based drug-discovery has proven to be an effective method for developing chemical probes to investigate relevant enzymatic targets. We have adopted this method to find ligands of key enzymes in the glycosylation cascade. Ongoing academic and industrial partnerships have allowed us to use state-of-the-art screening methods to identify fragment hits suitable for elaboration into potent “drug-like” compounds. These tools can also be used to study spatial and structural influences on endogenous glycan functions in processes such as immunity and cell signalling.

This work is being carried out in collaboration with the Francis Crick Chemical Biology STP (insert link) , the Fuchter group at Imperial College (insert link) and industrial collaborations. Ben is a Director of the Imperial College Master or Research (MRes) course Drug Discovery and Development, (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/courses/postgraduate-taught/drug-discovery-development/) aiming to train the next generation of drug discovery scientists.