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Our chemists make lots of funky new chemicals that could be the next wonder drug! But that won’t happen without the biology team. We have to come up with new ways of testing these chemicals to see if they could be used to treat diseases. We have to find a good “target” for the chemicals to work on-this could be an enzyme that has gone wrong in something like cancer, or a process that is needed for the survival of something like the bacteria that causes TB. We then have to find a way to measure this target (this is what we call an assay) so that we can tell if the new chemicals are having an effect.

I spend a lot of time in the lab setting up and running experiments. These can be ‘small scale’ at the start of a project (so just a few ‘wells’ of a plate), when I am designing the new assay,  to large scale (so hundreds of ‘plates’) when I am testing the chemicals made by our chemists in the assay I designed.

Once I have used the machines in the lab to obtain the results, I need to analyse them. When I am designing an assay I use excel spreadsheets to look at the data I have produced, but when I am testing hundreds of new chemicals I need to use automated software that does a lot of the analysis for me. Either way, I produce lots of pretty graphs!