As part of their service work, ten Lower Sixth students are participating in a new way to design medicinal drugs, supported by Professor Matt Todd at UCL and funded by the Royal Society.
On 19 November, four members of the team – Aashray, Javier, Mika and Sam – attended a conference at the Royal Society to explain their work so far. They also heard about the wide range of other projects that the Royal Society is supporting in schools. It is hoped that using an open-source model, within an academic rather than an industrial context, will enable the production and testing of potential drugs for neglected diseases; those that large drug companies simply cannot afford to research.
The Sevenoaks group received high praise from the academics who watched their presentation who described them as ‘formidable’ and their excitement about the project as ‘palpable’. In the afternoon session, Fellows and Members of the Royal Society, industry partners, and academics toured the conference and interrogated all of the groups. The Sevenoaks team were fielding questions from people of all sorts of backgrounds for over two hours and acquitted themselves absolutely brilliantly.
