Caitlin Gare is a Ph.D. student in Lara Malins' Lab at the Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, ANU, where she works within the Australian Reseqarch Council's Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science, CIPPS. Her research focuses on developing peptide-drug conjugates as therapeutics across numerous diseases, including as novel antimalarials, as well as creating novel chemical tools to help investigate key biological questions.
Malaria remains one of the world's most devastating infectious diseases, and growing resistance to existing treatments underscores the need for compounds with new mechanisms of action. Gare's work addresses this challenge by pairing cell-penetrating peptides with antimalarial drug cargoes to create conjugates that can selectively target infected red blood cells while delivering dual modes of action against the parasite.
The Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Before starting her doctorate studies in 2023, Gare completed a Bachelor of Science, Advanced and with Honours, at ANU, with a focus on chemistry and biology. She has already built an impressive publication record. Her first-author paper in ChemMedChem reported a library of peptide-drug conjugates with potencies ranging from low nanomolar to low micromolar, establishing a strategic framework for further development of antimalarial therapeutics. More recently, she co-authored a review in Trends in Biochemical Sciences examining how chemical modifications transform peptide leads into market-ready drugs, using semaglutide and MK-0616 as case studies.
Gare has also contributed to earlier work from the Malins Lab on antiplasmodial peptide-drug conjugates published in Bioconjugate Chemistry, and she has presented her research at numerous international conferences including the 2024 International Peptide Symposium and the 2026 Gordon Research Conference on the Chemistry and Biology of Peptides. Supported by ARC CIPPS, as part of her Ph.D. she has also been fortunate to undertake a three-month laboratory placement with the multi-national pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca in Sweden, further advancing her research and training.
Supervised by Professor Lara R. Malins, Gare is part of a research group working at the interface of organic synthesis and chemical biology. Her work exemplifies how peptide science can open new frontiers in drug development and the fight against drug-resistant infectious disease.
