The Department is very pleased to announce that the Dr David Spring has been given the Norman Heatley Award by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The Norman Heatley Award is to recognise and promote the importance of inter- and multi-disciplinary research between chemistry and the life sciences through independent work.
This award is named in honour of Norman Heatley. It was previously advertised as the Chemical Biology Interface Forum Early Career Award and was established in 2008.
Norman Heatley graduated from St John's College Cambridge with a degree in Natural Sciences, he then undertook a PhD in Biochemistry, also at Cambridge, after which he moved to Oxford to work at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology.
Although Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, he did not realise it's full potential. It was Professor Florey and his team at Oxford who recognised that penicillin could combat bacterial infection. Heatley played a key role in developing culture methods for the penicillium mould and in extracting and purifying the active 'penicillin' from the cultures in order to test it on animals and eventually on humans also. He designed the specially commissioned ceramic 'bed pans' to grow these cultures on a larger scale.
Dr Spring's research spans the disciplines of chemistry and biology through the synthesis of small molecules, which are applied to problems in the life sciences. In particular, he has focused on diversity-oriented synthesis, new synthetic methodologies and chemical biology in order to discover new antibiotics and anticancer drugs. In addition, he has developed microarray technologies for high throughput small molecule synthesis and screening.
He is a founder member of the Cambridge Molecular Therapeutics Programme that aims to use various approaches to find small molecules that disrupt protein- protein interactions of targets relevant to cancer.