Biota Award for Medicinal Chemistry

The Biota Award for Medicinal Chemistry is awarded annually to a younger chemist with less than 12 years of professional experience, and is given for the best drug design and development publication or patent in the previous calendar year concerning small molecules as potential therapeutic agents. A medal is awarded as well as a prize of $5,000, sponsored by Biota Holdings Ltd.

Dr. Matthew Piggott

A young investigator with an excellent record in novel treatments for Parkinson’s disease

Dr. Matthew Piggott has received the Biota Award for his research into novel analogues of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, ‘ecstasy’). MDMA ameliorates the debilitating side-effects of L-DOPA therapy for Parkinson’s disease in animal models, but has no therapeutic potential, primarily because it is psychoactive, but also because there is evidence that it may be neurotoxic. Based on known structure-psychoactivity relationships, the Piggott group designed, synthesized and evaluated a series of novel MDMA analogues, one of which, UWA-101, more effectively enhances the quality of L-DOPA therapy in animal models than MDMA or any other drug currently in the clinic or in clinical trials. UWA-101 is unlikely to be psychoactive, based on pre-pulse inhibition studies in rats. Additionally, it is not toxic to a model serotonergic cell line, even at high concentrations. Receptor binding and functional studies indicate that UWA-101 is a dual dopamine/serotonin transporter inhibitor, thus representing a novel class of drugs with potential for use as an adjunctive treatment for Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Piggott is a graduate of the University of Western Australia where Associate Professor Dieter Wege supervised his PhD studies. This was followed by post-doctoral research in a collaborative project with GlaxoSmithKline at the Research School of Chemistry at the ANU under the supervision of Professors Banwell and Easton. After further post-doctoral research at the Department of Chemistry at Boston College, Dr. Piggott returned to Australia to take up a lectureship at the Department of Chemistry at ANU. In 2005, he took up a lectureship at his current place of employment, where he is now an Associate Professor at the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UWA. The research in his group primarily involves the rational design and synthesis of biologically active
compounds as potential drug candidates or as probes.

The excellence of Dr. Piggott’s research has been recognised by award of the RACI Athel Beckwith Lectureship in 2008. Dr. Piggott has accepted an invitation to present his research at the conference of the Division of Biomolecular Chemistry to be held in July
2013 (“Biomolecular in the Bush”, http://www.raci-bio-conf.org/).