Professor Istvan TOTH is Chair in Biological Chemistry & Professor of Pharmacy, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; Affiliated Professorial Research Fellow and Group Leader, Institute of Molecular Biosciences. He graduated with a degree in Chemical Engineering from the Technical University, Budapest, Hungary in 1969 and was awarded his PhD in 1972 for research in Alkaloid Chemistry. In 1994 he was awarded a DSc for his work on drug delivery. Prof. Toth moved from the School of Pharmacy at the University of London to the University of Queensland in 1998, and leads a productive medicinal chemistry research group (presently 30 members). He is an elected RACI Fellow, Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciencees. In 2009 he was awarded the Adrian Albert award for sustained and outstanding research in medicinal biochemistry. He has over 300 peer-reviewed publications (>500 citations/year since 2012), 44 patents, and a strong record in research commercialisation. His research has attracted over $64 million in competitive grants, research contracts and investment funds in the past 10 years.
Professor Toth’s research has focused on applying chemistry to solve biological problems. His best-known invention is the lipid-core peptide system: a chimeric molecule that contains the antigen, carrier and adjuvant and can be adapted to deliver a vast range of peptides. This system can be tuned to act as a drug carrier or alternatively to act as a self-adjuvanting vaccine. The self-adjuvanting property is critical because very few adjuvants are approved for use in humans. These findings have important applications in the delivery of otherwise unstable drug molecules and for the preparation of stable subunit vaccines. Professor Toth also developed and patented a novel solution and solid-phase carbohydrate synthesis method that led to the formation of Alchemia Ltd.