Posted on | CategoriesMolecular Pharmaceutics | PI: Makoto Kondo, PhD

Engineered Human Juvenile Chondrocyte Sheets Safely Repair Damaged Cartilage

The body cannot heal damage to cartilage, and such defects eventually progress to joint osteoarthritis, impacting more than 5.6 million Americans. Current approaches to repairing cartilage have issues in the quality of the repaired tissue, potential treatment variability, costs, and long wait times for patients. Continue reading → Engineered Human Juvenile Chondrocyte Sheets Safely Repair Damaged Cartilage
Posted on | CategoriesDrug Discovery / Medicinal Chemistry | PI: Eric W. Schmidt, PhD

How Microbes Make Drug-like Molecules

Many life-saving drugs come from natural sources such as microbes. Learning how host organisms produce these drugs is an area of intense interest because scientists could exploit the pathways to produce more and better drug variants. Schmidt and colleagues have elucidated the mechanisms by which microbes produce one class of drug-like molecules, the Ribosomally-synthesized and Post-translationally modified Peptides (RiPPs). Continue reading → How Microbes Make Drug-like Molecules
Posted on | CategoriesDrug Discovery / Molecular Pharmaceutics | PI: Jindrich Henry Kopecek, MD

Drug-Free Macromolecular Therapeutics

Monoclonal antibody therapy has numerous benefits but can lack efficacy, often because monovalent binding of antibodies to specific receptors fails to translate into an active response. The Kopeček laboratory has built on their track record in polymeric drug delivery to develop a novel approach to therapeutic design, termed “Drug-Free Macromolecular Therapeutics (DFMT)”. Continue reading → Drug-Free Macromolecular Therapeutics
Posted on | CategoriesDrug Discovery / Medicinal Chemistry | PI: Raphael Franzini, PhD

Developing New Chemical Reactions that Can Be Performed in Living Cells

The development of bioorthogonal chemical reactions—chemical reactions that can be conducted in living cells—has been one of the most significant areas of advancement in chemistry in recent years. Franzini and colleagues have developed a series of highly efficient chemical reactions, termed “dissociative bioorthogonal reactions”, that do just that. Continue reading → Developing New Chemical Reactions that Can Be Performed in Living Cells
Posted on | CategoriesDrug Discovery / Molecular Pharmaceutics | PI: Mingnan Chen, PhD

A New Strategy for Treating Autoimmune Disease While Maintaining Immune Function

The Chen Lab discovered a new therapeutic strategy that avoids immune deficiency while treating autoimmune disease. Specifically, they identified immune cells that express a key immune checkpoint receptor that drives type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. The Chen Lab then created an immunotoxin that selectively depletes these cells. Continue reading → A New Strategy for Treating Autoimmune Disease While Maintaining Immune Function