Our interests broadly is a deep understanding of the chemistry that underpins biology. All of our capabilities are available for collaboration or commercial research projects.
Intellectual property from our research programmes are available for licence, while IP generated during fee-for-service work remains with the client.
Carbohydrate Chemistry was the research focus of our namesake, Prof. Robin Ferrier and his colleagues and from which grew the Ferrier Research Institute. The synthesis and analysis of bespoke and natural carbohydrate compounds has its own complexities. Our capability and the specialist equipment to support it has grown over the years and has been applied to human health and environmental projects.
Team Lamiable-Oulaid, Team Harris, Team Hinkley
Impact are: Environment, Cancer, infectious-diseases, Rare-diseases
We have a talented core of synthetic chemists who can tackle any target. We have successfully developed routes to targets that others have shied away from and have also outperformed competitors on the race to complex targets during our commercially funded research. This core of people is supported by state-of-the-art equipment to ensure high efficiency in our route development and target preparation.
Team Lamiable-Oulaidi, Team Harris, Team Rendle, Team Painter
Impact area: Cancer, infectious-diseases, Rare-diseases
We have expertise in the isolation and analysis of the chemical components of natural products. We have also developed our own semi-automated process for isolation of compounds from natural extracts, supported by world-class NMR technologies allows. This method allows the discovery of new natural products that would otherwise degrade or be missed from crude natural extracts.
Expertise: Bespoke Scientific Software/Instruments
Our synthetic chemistry and natural product expertise is supported by analytical capability and instruments, with methods specifically tuned to investigate complex carbohydrates. As part of this analytical capability we co-manage and own the Gracefield NMR facility with Callaghan Innovation.
Through our long collaboration with Prof. Vern Schramm we have the ability to precisely understand an enzyme/substrate transition state and therefore design and synthesise potent inhibitors of that enzyme or chaperones for a defective enzyme.
Team Lamiable-Oulaidi, Team Harris, Team Parker
Impact area: Cancer, infectious-diseases, Rare-diseases
We host the New Zealand RNA Development Platform. Its aim is to ensure New Zealand has well-connected and world-class research capability to strengthen the use and commercialisation of RNA technology.
Impact area: Cancer, infectious-diseases
News article: Scientific breakthrough harnesses mRNA technology to develop powerful malaria vaccine
We have an off-the-self and a built-in-house peptide synthesiser and have developed experience in the preparation and purification of difficult peptides, modified peptides and glycopeptides.
Impact area: Cancer, infectious-diseases
We harness the power of synthetic biology to produce natural products with valuable bioactive potential. We use our custom-built DNA assembly system (MIDAS) to construct large biosynthetic pathways that we introduce into our fungal hosts to generate natural and new to nature compounds.
We have a strong focus on the development and use of synthetic biology tools to create fungal strains with increased potential to deliver optimal yields of our desired products. We focus on the manufacture of natural products that are inaccessible to commercial markets through conventional approaches. We utilise our team’s extensive knowledge of molecular biology, biochemistry and chemistry to truly understand natural product biosynthesis with the ultimate goal of predicting structure from sequence.
Using a variety of computational and experimental approaches we are also seeking to increase our understanding the molecular details of communication networks in proteins.
Impact area: infectious-diseases, Agrichemicals
News article: Breaking the mould
We build our own bespoke scientific equipment and software for ourselves and others. This includes a web based chemical inventory management database compliant with New Zealand regulations, a semi-automated hazard assessment tool as part of our electronic labbook software, automated chromatography for isolating natural products from crude extracts, a peptide synthesiser, cell sorting equipment and equipment for photochemistry reactions using high-power monochromatic LEDs.
Expertise: Natural products, Peptide/Glycopeptide Synthesis
Through experience within Ferrier and our close links with GlycoSyn we have access to the chemical engineering knowledge and the ability to develop synthetic chemical processes for scale-up and ultimately cGMP manufacture.
View the analytical instruments and synthesis facilities that support the research and services offered by the Ferrier Research Institute.
Ensuring New Zealand has well-connected and world-class research capability to strengthen the use and commercialisation of RNA technology
