PhD Scholarship in Gold-based drugs for the effective treatment of ovarian cancer

This project will develop and test new gold-based compounds as alternatives to current ovarian cancer chemotherapies. The Scholarship will fund a 3 year PhD candidature to work in the Chemistry Department of the RMIT School of Science CAMIC Laboratory. The project is a collaboration with immunologists (SHBS) to test gold-compounds as anti-ovarian cancer therapeutics. Current treatments for ovarian cancer are largely toxic, and ultimately, ineffective for many patients. A current collaboration between Professor Bhargava (Science) and Professor Plebanski (Health & Biomedical Sciences, SHBS) seeks to enable clinical progression for their novel class of gold-based drugs that show superior selectivity and activity for otherwise drug-resistant cancer cells. As part of Professor Bhargava's team, the PhD candidate will contribute to building structure-activity relationships (SARs) based around targeted modifications of their patented gold-based drug candidate using innovative in vitro protocols to refine lead drug candidate(s).