31 December 2005

CBE for Professor Alan Fairlamb

Professor Alan Fairlamb, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at the University of Dundee’s School of Life Sciences, has been awarded the CBE for his services to medical science.

Prof Fairlamb (58), who is head of the University’s Division of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Microbiology, is a world-renowned specialist in the biochemistry of tropical diseases. He is one of the leading researchers involved with the University’s recently launched programme of drug discovery for tropical diseases, primarily aimed at African sleeping sickness, Chagas’ disease and leishmaniasis.

The CBE completes a hat-trick of honours for Prof Fairlamb. In 2005 he was also elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and awarded the Kitasato Medal for Microbial Chemistry, one of the most notable awards in his field.

"It is indeed a great honour to receive such a prestigious award," Prof Fairlamb said of his CBE. "I hope that this will highlight the need for better, safer and cheaper drugs to treat these neglected diseases of the poor."

"I have always been passionate about easing the suffering of people living in tropical areas of the world. My basic research has never lost sight of the need to discover better treatments for these terrible diseases. Improving people’s health is one way of helping to reduce poverty that is such a blight on the developing world."

Prof Fairlamb has been based in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee for the past nine years. Previously he worked at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and at the Rockefeller University in New York.

He has served as an advisor on numerous expert committees in the tropical parasitic disease area, including the World Health Organisation, the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.Prof Fairlamb was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh when he first learned about the need for better drugs to treat these infections. “This changed the course of my career. After completing my medical degree, I decided to go hunting for drug targets in parasites in the expectation that pharmaceutical companies would use these discoveries to develop new drugs. Unfortunately, these discoveries have not been fully exploited by the pharmaceutical industry largely due to the cost and risk involved.

"Our new initiative at the University of Dundee to discover and develop candidate drugs for clinical trials should help to address part of the problem by reducing the financial risk to downstream pharmaceutical partners."

Prof Fairlamb has published over 200 papers in the field of parasite biochemistry and molecular biology.

He lives in Newport-on-Tay with his wife Carolyn Strobos and children Zoe (15) and Thomas (12). His eldest daughter, Saffron, lives in Southend on Sea.

For more information contact:

Roddy Isles,
Head of Press
Tel: 01382 384910,
Email: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk