Science thomsonreuters.com

After two years of pre-med school in Thailand I was offered a Thai government scholarship to UK to study chemistry. This marked an early change in my career path from a physician to a chemist, which I believe suited my personality more. You see I like investigating things and I think others identified early on that I'm good at general science and looking at the 'bigger picture'. My interest has always been in the interface between things like science and society.

When I returned to Thailand from the UK I began working as a researcher. I found it very difficult because there was no money and almost no infrastructure for this kind of work, so I decided to pursue a double career in my life — one in the lab and one helping to build an infrastructure for science in my country.

I was a very young member of the committee which established the Ministry of Science and Technology about 30 years ago and was also chosen to help represent Thailand's bid to become the home to a new international genetic engineering and biotechnology centre. Although we were unsuccessful, the experience paved the way to create our own national centre.

I was the first president of the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) and also Thailand's Minister for Science and Technology for a year and a half, which was a very good interlude in my scientific career.

I'm quite pleased with our progress, though not completely satisfied. I think compared to other countries with the same level of development as Thailand then we are doing very well in terms of our infrastructure. However I do think we are lagging behind in terms of funding and manpower. In relation to research and development, a country at a similar development stage to us will be spending at least 1% of its GDP on research and development and have perhaps 10 to 20 people per 10,000 working as researchers. In Thailand we are currently only spending about 0.2% GDP and have 4-5 researchers per 10,000 people. So we have some way to go to rectify this shortfall.

For the last three decades I have been working on antimalarial development because malaria is still a big disease in Thailand and throughout the world. My background in chemistry helped me in looking at the possibility of developing drugs – so using x-ray crystallography I look at the structure of drug targets and then design drugs that will fit the structures I find. First of all I see if they inhibit the malaria parasite and furthermore, see if they are toxic.

I have been supported by Medicines for Malaria Ventures (MMV) and collaborate with partners in London and Melbourne, Australia to develop new drugs. These drugs belong to the anti-folate family and deprive parasites of the raw materials for their DNA synthesis. Malaria parasites are very clever and learn to become resistant to these drugs so we have to study the structure of the enzymes that has mutated so the drug no longer binds to the enzyme.

Previously, along with people before us, we have used modelling to try and understand the mutant structure and assume the design would bind based on the assessment. Since 2003 the real structures of the enzymes have been the major advance in our field as we have the ability to fully study the structure and test the design in real terms to see how it binds to the enzyme.

Of course we then need to see if the drug is bioavailable and actually get to the target so we test it in malaria culture. Furthermore, since we want to develop oral drugs, we must ensure it can enter the blood system from the digestive tract and get to the infected blood cells. This means the drug has to be orally bioavailable, which is done by our partners at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and Monash University in Melbourne.

One of our drugs, P218 is in late stage preclinical trial and will be human-tested as early as next year. This is the first time we in Thailand have designed and synthesised a compound that has reached the stage it has.

As you probably know, no drug lasts forever and sooner or later a resistance will crop up because malaria parasites are really very good at defending themselves. So our focus now is on second generation compounds that will help delay the development of resistance and we are testing a number of theories right now.

It's really an ongoing battle because I know the parasites will fight back! It will take decades to truly eradicate malaria. I think we will have success in pockets of Thailand but the real problem is not scientific but social. We are bordered by Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, so while we can look after our own problem in Thailand, it's very difficult to contain when our neighbours still have the endemic disease.

What I found is that Thomson Reuters ResearcherID is superior to PubMed as when I looked up my own work, it listed 146 publications whereas PubMed only cited 100 or so. What I also like is that Thomson Reuters have the publications that are not normally in the mainstream journals. It is very important for our work to have access to not only the international publications but also ones with regional relevance.