125 stories for 125 years

Bill Charman

Professor William Charman currently holds a personal chair as Professor of Pharmaceutics and is director of the college's Centre for Drug Candidate Optimisation (CDCO). He received his Bachelor of Pharmacy degree from the college in 1981 and has been continuously registered as a pharmacist in Victoria since 1982. In 2007, Bill will become the dean of the college.

After receiving his PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry (with honours) from the University of Kansas in 1985, he was Senior Scientist and then Group Leader at the Sterling-Winthrop Research Institute (Sterling Drug) in Rensselear, New York. He returned to Melbourne in 1989 to pursue an academic career at the college, where his research interests have included oral absorption and bioavailability of poorly water-soluble drugs, lymphatic drug transport, lead candidate optimisation and the discovery and development of drugs for neglected diseases.

As a research-led and committed educator, Bill’s teaching responsibilities have included physical pharmacy, formulation design and drug delivery in the pharmacy, medicinal chemistry and formulation science degree programs. At the postgraduate level he has graduated approximately 25 higher degree students and mentored over 60 research staff.

Bill’s research career has been characterised by a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to address major issues in drug discovery, drug delivery and the pharmaceutical sciences. Over the past six years, his research team has attracted more than $23 million in funding. Recent highlights include the establishment of the CDCO (which now employs 25 staff); the collaborative design of a new drug for malaria, currently in Phase 2 clinical trials (published in Nature); the progression by the CDCO’s collaborative partners of three drug candidates into Phase 1 human clinical trials; and the completion of two major international licensing deals.

Major awards include the GlaxoWellcome International Achievement award in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain in 1999, the Drug Discovery Project of the Year award from the Medicines for Malaria Venture (Geneva, Switzerland) in 2002, the Australasian Pharmaceutical Sciences Association Medal in 2005 and the Controlled Release Society International Career Achievement in Oral Drug Delivery Award in 2006. Bill was elected as a Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists in 2002.

Bill has substantial business experience, having been a member of the board of directors and the audit committee at Sigma Co. Ltd for eight years and co-founder and member of the board of directors of Acrux Ltd. He has published more than 320 scientific papers and communications, given over 130 invited national and international presentations, is a member of four international editorial boards and is associate editor of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Bill is a member of the Expert Scientific Advisory Committee of the Medicines for Malaria Venture, chairman of the Wellcome Trust Seeding Drug Discovery Committee, an advisor to the World Health Organization and a member of various scientific advisory boards.