Biochemist Professor David Craik was in Sydney on Wednesday to receive $80,000 in funding for his laboratory at the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience where he and his team have been working for close to 20 years to develop cone snail toxins into pain relievers.

It was Professor Craik's discovery of a unique peptide - or mini protein - in tropical plants that gave rise to the potential development.

The plant peptide first came to the notice of a Norwegian Red Cross doctor working in Africa in the 1960s, who observed women having fast child births after sipping a tea made from a local plant.

"But at the time they didn't know why the plant-based medicine worked. [The doctor] took some of the plants that they were using back to Norway and found that the active ingredient in it was the peptide," Professor Craik said.

That sparked Professor Craik's interest, because peptides cannot typically be ingested.

Professor Craik examined the unique peptide and discovered it was circular in shape, rather than linear, like most other protein chains.

Its shape made the peptide, called a cyclotide, exceptionally stable so that it could survive the digestive tract.

Professor Craik and his team were able to produce synthetic proteins based on the structure of the cyclotides.

He has since engineered a molecule combining the pain-relieving proteins of the cone-snail with the cyclotide to create an experimental drug.

"It still hasn't been tested in humans, but it's very, very potent in animals," Professor Craik said.

The cyclotides also have another application that could see cancer patients in third-world countries eating genetically modified seeds and plants as medicine.

Professor Craik trekked through the jungles of Africa, South America, China and Thailand to find cyclotide-containing plants, but also found them in his own backyard.

There are more than 60 examples of the special peptides in the native Australian violent. The common petunia also contains cyclotides.

"Because plants produce these peptides in large amounts, in theory we can make a designer cyclotide in the lab, then make a synthetic gene for that cyclotide and put that into a crop plant," Professor Craik said.

"For example, we could have it expressed in the seed of the plant.

"We're excited about that because in principal this could be very important for third-world medicine where people can't necessarily afford these high-tech protein drugs.

"If they could be producing them in plants in the backyard and making them into medicinal tea or swallowing seeds then it would be a way of bringing high-tech drugs to the third-world."

Professor Craik said a portion of the $80,000 funding would be used to explore the idea of using plants to make therapeutic peptides.

"I have a plant molecular biologist who will use part of this money to put some novel cyclotides into petunia plants...to look as the feasibility of using plants as a cheap way of making pharmaceuticals," he said.