Distinguished Professor Dame Margaret Brimble has been awarded the Davy Medal from the Royal Society (London). This award acknowledges Dame Margaret’s outstanding contributions to organic chemistry with wide-ranging applications across the life sciences. This very worthy accolade marks accomplishments such as the development of trofinetide, the first drug to treat Rett Syndrome and the spin-out company SapVax producing lipidated peptides for self-adjuvanting cancer vaccines. Synthetic chemistry triumphs such as the total syntheses of complex spiroacetal and spiroimine natural products, preparation of bioactive and therapeutic peptides, and the CLipPa technology that achieves cysteine lipidation of peptides are particularly noteworthy contributions to chemistry made by the Brimble group.
The Davy medal is named after the famous chemist Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829), who discovered and/or first isolated several of the elements, including sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, barium, bromine, chlorine and strontium, discovered the anaethetic and “laughing gas” properties of nitrous oxide, founded the field of electrochemistry and invented the aponymously named Davy lamp (to avoid explosions in flammable atmospheres such as mines). Previous winners of the medal include Pierre and Marie Curie and Linus Pauling, and, in all, 22 winners of the Davy medal have gone on to win Nobel Prizes. More details can be found at https://royalsociety.org/grants-schemes-awards/awards/davy-medal/. Many congratulations to Professor Brimble from NZIC on this outstanding achievement!
