ARC linkage grant

Announced this week.

http://www.arc.gov.au/2015-linkage-projects

$670,242 over 3 years. Phylogica working with UQ.

Professor Kirill Alexandrov.
"This project aims to develop a novel strategy for the production of polypeptides with unnatural chemical groups using a sense codon reassignment approach. Novel peptides could be used in a range of pharmaceutical applications. Peptides made of 20 natural amino acids cover only a very small fraction of the available chemical and functional space. While a peptide’s functionality can be extended with unnatural amino acids, the methods for their site-selective incorporation are inefficient. The project’s strategy relies on the depletion of selected tRNAs from an in vitro protein translation system and their replacement with synthetic tRNAs, charged with unnatural amino acids. It is expected that the developed technology could be used to rapidly generate and screen highly diversified macrocyclic peptide libraries."

Some government cash - always helpful for early biotechs. Not too sure it's relevance, I'm not following PYC in great depth at present.