NJC Blog

Yang Wang

 Yang Wang, a young Chinese Ph.D. student in the group of Dr Ling Peng at the CINaM in Marseille, won the NJC Poster Prize awarded at the 7th Organic Chemistry Meeting of Marseille. His research interests lie in synthesizing different kinds of dendrimers and their bio-application in drug delivery, especially nucleic acids drug delivery.  

Yang’s winning poster was entitled  “Synthesis of amphiphilic poly(aminoester) dendrimers  for drug delivery”. Poly(aminoester) dendrimers show great promise as biodegradable nanocarriers for drug delivery due to their advantageous properties: biodegradability, potentially lower toxicity and possibility of diverse chemical conjugations. This work presented the design and synthesis of amphiphilic poly(aminoester) dendrimers bearing amine terminal functionalities for effective drug delivery.  

Konstantin Chegaev

 Two NJC poster prizes were awarded at the 6th French-Italian Chemistry Days, also held in Marseille and organized under the auspices of the French Chemical Society (SCF).  

Dr Konstantin Chegaev is a researcher in the group of Prof. Roberta Fruttero, in the Department of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology of the University of Torino. He is focusing his research in the field of anticancer drugs with particular interest to the problem of multi-drug resistance.  

The title of Konstantin’s poster was “Multitarget drugs: NO-donor doxorubicins”. The major result presented in this work is the reversal of multitarget drug resistance in doxorubicin-resistant cell lines. The use of exogenous NO-donor molecules provoke the nitration of tyrosine residue of MDR pumps with consequent increase of doxorubicin accumulation and toxicity in HT29dx cell lines. The authors believe that NO-donor doxorubicins warrant further investigations in preclinical and clinical settings.  

Momar Toure

Ph.D. student Momar Toure was the 2nd laureate at this meeting. He is completing his studies in the groups of Jean-Luc Parrain and Olivier Chuzel in the iSm2 laboratory at the University of Aix-Marseille.  

Momar’s poster was on “Self-assembled calixborate macrocyclic anion receptors“. Well-designed macrocyclic calixborates  incorporating imidazolium functinalities were synthesized in high yield. These new macrocycles display a high binding affinity for halides and oxoanions.  

Congratulations to all 3 laureates!
  

A list of all previous NJC Poster Prize winners can be found here.

I attended the first ERC Grantees Conference at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg last month, to hear about the research of recent winners of ERC starting and advanced grants in chemistry. The conference was proposed and organized by two chemists at the Institut Charles Sadron of Strasbourg: Nicolas Giuseppone and Jean-François Lutz.

The first two days began with plenary lectures by Jean-Marie Lehn and Ben Feringa, sponsored by Angewandte Chemie (Wiley) and NJC (RSC), respectively. The presentations by 24 grantees of the 2007–2011 grant period were strongly oriented towards complex systems, both chemical and biological.

European Research Council officials were also on hand to present the grants program and give an update on what to expect in the coming proposal period.

Conference participants board the sightseeing boat in front of the European Parlement that will take them to the conference dinner.

On Friday evening, a boat ride on the Ill river flowing through the center of Strasbourg took participants to the conference dinner held at the historic Maison Kammerzell, next to the cathedral.

The next morning, the younger participants eagerly awaited the announcement of the four poster prizes, provided by three scientific publishers (Nature, Wiley and the RSC for NJC). Dr Yan-Jun Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Damien Baigl (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) won the NJC prize. Her poster was entitled “High-yield preparation of proteo-liposomes: a synthetic biology approach”.

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