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The research in Malcolm McConville's laboratory is directed at understanding how microbial pathogens survive in humans and other animal hosts, with the aim of developing new anti-microbial agents and vaccines.
The McConville Group's focus is on pathogens that cause human leishmaniasis, malaria and tuberculosis. With more than half the world's population at threat of these diseases, current drug treatments and vaccines are inadequate or non-existent. While many aspects of the metabolism of these pathogens has been intensively studied in the laboratory, little is still known about their metabolism in the host, particularly when these pathogens invade and live inside host cells. The group has developed new methods for directly measuring the metabolism of pathogens in host cells and are using these approaches to identify and validate new drug targets.
Techniques include: A combination of bioinformatic, genetic, biochemical and cell biology approaches are used to study molecular processes that underpin host cell-pathogen interactions. A wide range of analytic techniques (including hyphenated mass spectrometry, NMR) are used to profile and identify low molecular weight metabolites produced by microbial pathogens and host cells during infection. Molecular biology and cell biology techniques are used to investigate the function of genes that are candidate drug targets. Synthetic chemical approaches are used to generate reagents to assay and inhibit new enzymes.
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Malcolm McConville's Bio
Professor Malcolm McConville has had a long-standing interest in the metabolism of microbial pathogens with the view of identifying new drug targets. He received his PhD from the University of Melbourne and held post-doctoral fellowships at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and the University of Dundee, Scotland. He moved his research group to the Department of Biochemistry in 1994 and since then has received substantial funding from the NHMRC, the Wellcome Trust, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is currently a Principal Research Fellow with the NHMRC and is involved in the establishment of the Metabolomics Australia hub in the Bio21 Institute.
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McConville Research Group
Research Staff
Postgraduate Students
- Dave de Souza
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Jo Heng
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William Ng
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