Distinguished Professor Dame Margaret Brimble, of Auckland, DNZM for services to science
Distinguished Professor Dame Margaret Brimble has made world-class contributions to research in medicinal chemistry and has been a key driver of the creation of a nascent drug discovery and development industry in New Zealand.
Dame Margaret is Chair of Organic Chemistry and Director of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Auckland. She discovered the drug candidate NNZ2566, named Trofinetide by the World Health Organisation, which is currently in phase three human clinical trials for treatment of Rett Syndrome and Fragile X syndrome. She established New Zealand’s first Good Manufacturing Practice Peptide Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient Manufacturing Facility that was licensed by Medsafe NZ and produced clinical grade antigens for the MELVAC melanoma vaccine trial in 2014. She is Principal Investigator in the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery. She was Chair of the Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Foundation from 2009 until 2016. She has supported the L’Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Programme. Since 2014 she has held the roles of Vice-President and President of the Organic and Bimolecular Division International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). She has been a panel member of the European Research Council Synthetic Chemistry and Materials Science Advanced Grants Scheme since 2015. In 2018 Dame Margaret was the first New Zealand woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society (London).