The Boris Family Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory is a state of the art synthetic chemistry research facility at McMaster University, Canada. Its establishment in 2019 was made possible by a generous philanthropic donation to McMaster by the Marta and Owen Boris Foundation.
WHO WE ARE
The "Boris Lab" is home to a team of research staff scientists, graduate students, and undergraduates with expertise in synthetic and medicinal chemistry. The team is led by Dr. Jakob Magolan who is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences and the inaugural holder of Boris Family Endowed Chair of Drug Discovery at McMaster.
WHAT WE DO
The goal of the Boris Family Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory is to pursue strategic interdisciplinary research partnerships with biomedical scientists at McMaster to enable the discovery and development of new small molecule drug candidates. We collaborate with colleagues in multiple therapeutic areas to develop new molecules with the potential to become innovative medicines that improve the health and lives of Canadians and people worldwide.
As members of the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University, our chemists are immersed in a rich culture of innovation and discovery in health research. We are fortunate to have opportunities to work with many brilliant biomedical scientists and benefit from the vast research infrastructure and resources associated with McMaster's various Biomedical Research Institutes and Centres including the David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery (DBCAD) and the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research (IIDR).
July 2026 – Drug Discovery & Natural Products
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McMaster News: “McMaster scientists develop tech to reproduce rare medicinal molecules”
Nature Communications: “Alumina-Templated ortho-Prenylation of Phenols”
Our laboratory has developed a new chemistry platform that enables efficient laboratory synthesis of rare, biologically active plant- and fungus-derived molecules that are otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain at useful scale. The method uses inexpensive alumina to form prenylated phenol, a class of natural products with promising activity in areas including cancer, inflammation, infection, and neurological disease. To highlight this technology, we made 15 hard-to-access natural products, including grifolin, arachidin 2, and iroko. This approach can provide gram-scale material for biological studies and is designed to be scalable without relying on the harvesting of vast amounts of natural source material.
June 2026 – Oncology & Translation
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The Boris Lab-enabled collaboration between the Magolan and Singh labs at McMater continues to advance drug candidates designed to stop cancer cells from colonizing the brain. A recent publication in PNAS, titled "Selectively targeting inosine monophosphate dehydrogenase-2 impairs brain metastatic potential while preserving immune cell function", disclosed recent scientific progress of this program.
And from Sept 2025: McMaster Health Sciences: “Block Biosciences: A new McMaster spinout is changing metastatic brain cancer from a fatal condition to one that’s entirely preventable” Our brain-metastasis research program has yielded Block Biosciences, a McMaster spinout focused on developing preventative therapies for metastatic brain cancer. The company builds on a collaboration among medicinal chemists, cancer biologists, and drug-development partners to advance selective small-molecule inhibitors that could prevent cancer cells from establishing metastatic lesions in the brain.
October 2025 – Infectious Diseases / Artificial Intelligence
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The Boris Lab contributed to a multidisciplinary effort to discover and characterize enterololin, a promising narrow-spectrum antibacterial compound with activity against Enterobacteriaceae, including adherent-invasive Escherichia coli (AIEC), a pathogen associated with inflammatory bowel disease. Rather than broadly disrupting the gut microbiome, enterololin showed targeted activity against this important group of Gram-negative bacteria.
October 2024 - Oncology
McMaster chemists and neurobiologists team up to tackle cancer that spreads to the brain. The Boris Family Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory has enabled a resaerch collaboration between the neuroscience lab of Prof. Sheila Singh and medicinal chemists in the Magolan lab. This research has yielded an impactful discovery in field of metastatic brain cancer, detailed in ther publication in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. This research has been supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and adMare BioInnovations. The program continues with efforts underway to develop new first-in-class therapeutics that can prevent the spread of cancers to the brain from other sites.
February 2022 - Cardiovascular Health
Medical News Today: "How does caffeine reduce heart disease risk?"
Hamilton Spectator: "Hamilton scientists discover why coffee is good for your heart"
Sci-News: "Study: Caffeine Impacts Expression of Genes Known to Mediate Cardiovascular Risk"
Our drug discovery efforts in the area of cardiovascular health, led by our colleague Prof. Richard Austin and his team, have resulted in an important research article published in Nature Communications titled "Caffeine blocks SREBP2-induced hepatic PCSK9 expression to enhance LDLR-mediated cholesterol clearance". This research has also led to the founding of a new McMaster spin-off company called Systemic Therapeutics, systemictx.com.
May 2021 - Oncology
Our laboratory collaborates extensively with Prof. Mick Bhatia and his team on the discovery of novel anti-cancer drug candidates. We disclosed some of this research with an article in the journal Cell Chemical Biology. The article describes the discovery of a natural molecule, isolated for the first time from a bacterium, that exhibits potent anti-cancer activity by binding to SAE2 and thereby inhibiting a cellular process called SUMOylation.
February 2020 - Infectious Diseases
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The Guardian: "Cannabis compound could be weapon in fight against superbugs"
New York Post: "Marijuana could fight drug-resistant superbugs like MRSA, study stays"
CBC News: "McMaster researchers find cannabis has antibiotic potential"
Our laboratory contributed to an impactful research study led by Prof. Eric Brown and his team that was disclosed as an article titled "Uncovering the hidden antibiotic potential of Cannabis" in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases. The article describes extensive experimental data indicating antimicrobial activity of several cannabinoid molecules, especially that of a cannabinoid called cannabigerol or "CBG."