Dr Malinda Salim is a research fellow in Professor Ben J. Boyd’s group at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and part of the Monash University Pharmaceutical 'Milkshake Team'.
The team has won the Australian Museum 2020 Eureka Prize for the groups ‘milkshake for malaria’. The team received the Prize for Innovative Use of Technology for their novel approach to producing drug formulations.
Dr Salim and the team developed a synchrotron-based method for studying the interactions between milk and drugs. They have produced the first single-dose malaria cure — dubbed the “milkshake to cure malaria”.
Originally from Indonesia, Malinda graduated with a PhD from the department with broad interests in global health and nutrition for paediatrics, she focuses on the development and understanding of milk and milk-based formulations for oral delivery of poorly water-soluble drugs (which has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation) and recently has expanded to the nutritional aspects of these milk-based systems. Malinda has also been involved in organising international meetings and is currently assistant editor for the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science.
The Austrialian Museum Eureka Awards is an annual cermony that reward excellence in Australian science.