Peter Colman


Peter Malcolm Colman is the head of the structural biology division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia.

Education

Colman was educated at the University of Adelaide, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1966 and a PhD in 1969 for research on the chemical structure of parabanic acid complexes supervised by Harry Medlin.

Research and career

Colman's research interests are in structural biology, especially of human B-cell lymphoma 2. Colman determined the three-dimensional structure of the influenza virus neuraminidase and, in one of the earliest cases of structure-based drug design, discovered zanamivir, the first-in-class neuraminidase inhibitor for influenza. His subsequent structural studies on resistance to this drug class suggested how to design drugs against moving targets. His discoveries underpin drug stockpiling for pandemic preparedness. He has made seminal contributions to structural studies of antibodies and antibody-antigen complexes. Recent work on apoptosis solves the long-standing problem of how pro-apoptotic Bax changes conformation to dimerise and then oligomerise and permeabilise the mitochondrial membrane, an essential step in the intrinsic cell-death pathway.
His work has been published in leading peer reviewed scientific journals including Nature, the Journal of Molecular Biology, and Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology.

Awards and honours

In the Queen's 2017 Birthday Honours Colman was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia's highest civilian honour, "for eminent service to medical research, particularly in the fields of structural biology and medicinal chemistry, as a leader in the commercial translation of scientific discoveries, to professional organisations, and as a mentor of young scientists".
Colman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. In 2001 he was awarded a Centenary Medal "For service to Australian society and science in structural biology". Colman was also elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1989 and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 1997. He was awarded the Macfarlane Burnet Medal and Lecture in 1995.