UKZN Professor Honoured With 2024 Meienhofer Award
UKZN Professor Honoured With 2024 Meienhofer Award
The Boulder Peptide Society based in the United States (US) has honoured UKZN Professor Fernando Albericio with the 2024 Meienhofer Award in recognition of a lifetime of achievement in peptide science.
Albericio is only the second scientist outside the US to achieve this honour.
The biennial award is named after Johannes Meienhofer, who laid the foundation of modern synthetic peptide therapeutics. Meienhofer, whose work demonstrated the power of medicinal chemistry in peptide pharmacology, is remembered for his transformative discoveries in solid phase peptide synthesis.
Albericio began his peptide journey almost 50 years ago in his native Barcelona where he earned a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (UB) under the guidance of Ernest Giralt. After several postdoctoral stays at Tufts University (Victor Najjar), Université d’Aix-Marseille (Jurphass van Rietschoten), and the University of Minnesota (George Barany) he returned to Barcelona in 1985 as an associate professor at the UB. From 1992-94, he was Director of Peptide Research at Millipore in Boston in the US, later rejoining the UB after this period and was promoted to full professor in 1995. From 2003-2015, he was group leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) and between 2014 and 2015, was founder Rector of Yachay Tech, a university in Ecuador.
Currently, Albericio is a Research Professor based in UKZN’s School of Chemistry and Physics and an Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (Spain).
Albericio’s primary research interests cover practically all aspects of peptide synthetic methodology; the synthesis of peptides and small molecules with therapeutic activities (cancer and infectious diseases), and peptide-based drug delivery systems. Most recently, he has been working on greening solid-phase peptide synthesis processes. He has published more than 1 000 scientific articles and graduated more than 75 PhD students.
Albericio has received several awards, including the Vincent du Vigneaud and the Murray Goodman Awards from the American Peptide Society, and the Leonidas Zervas from the European Peptide Society.
Albericio will officially receive the Meienhofer Award at the 2024 Boulder Peptide Symposium in September this year, where he will give a presentation highlighting his prodigious record of research achievements.
‘The College is lucky to have an academic like Professor Albericio, who is a world leader in Peptide synthesis,’ said Dean of Research, Professor Neil Koorbanally. ‘His presence in the College does much to inspire young and emerging researchers.’
Said Albericio: ‘This peptide journey began at the University of Barcelona 50 years ago and looks set to end in Durban at the University of KwaZulu-Natal within a few years. I have worked on five continents and created several work teams. In all of this, the most important thing is the people. Thank you to everyone who has shared this unforgettable journey with me.’
Words: Sally Frost
Photograph: Supplied
