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”.

(more…)

NJC sponsored two poster prizes at the recent 3rd International Symposium on Biological Applications of Dendrimers, held in Toledo, Spain at the beginning of September. Below I present the winners.

Ladies first! Franka Ennen is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the group of Dietmar Appelhans and Brigitte Voit at the Leibniz Institute for Polymerresearch (IPF) Dresden, Germany. The group is interested in gaining a fundamental understanding of the interactions of natural and synthetic macromolecules such as dendritic glycopolymers or novel proteins for various applications. Franka chose to do her research thesis work at the IPR so as to acquire expertise in various physical/microscopic techniques such as TEM and AFM.

In her poster, “Uptake Behaviour of Oligosaccharide Modified Hyperbranched Poly(ethyleneimine) with Various Watersoluble B-Vitamins” Franka addressed the application of hyperbranched glycopolymers as chromatographic selectors and showed promising first results of oligosaccharide modified poly(ethylene imines) as stationary phases for selective and efficient separation in a chromatographic process, specifically capillary electrochromatography. This work was a collaboration between the IPF and Prof. Dr. Ludmila Anna Kartsova from the State University in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The second winner is Pablo Mesa Antúnez, also a 2nd year graduate student. After a first degree in chemistry and a Masters thesis on luminescent doped silica nanoparticles, Pablo is continuing his studies at the University of Malaga, in the Biomimetic Dendrimers and Photonic Laboratory. His research, supported by an FPI grant from the Spanish government and carried out under the supervision of Ezequiel Perez-Inestrosa, is focused on the development of new dendrimers based on amide bonds and with amine-terminal groups for biomedical applications.

Pablo’s poster on the “Synthesis of New Amine-terminal Dendrimers. The Alternative Henry Approach”, highlights precisely the possibilities given by the Henry approach in the synthesis of dendrimers to obtain different structures and the relatively easy way to obtain the sought-for dendrimer with the azide approach.

The symposium organizers also awarded a poster prize to Rosa M. Reguera, professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the Veterinary School of the University of León in Spain, for her poster entitled “Carbosilane Dendrimers as Chemotherapy against Leishmania Parasite”. With her collaborators, Rosa has developed an in vitro high throughput screening system, which is based on genetically engineered Leishmania strains that emit infrared fluorescence in living cells, to test hundreds of potential antileishmanial compounds.

Collaborators include the Immune-Molecular Department headed by Dra. Muñoz-Fernández of General Hospital Gregorio Marañon in Madrid and Drs De La Mata and Gomez of the Inorganic Chemistry Department at the Universidad de Alcalá (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid). In their winning poster, carbosilane dendrimers were used as a drug delivery system to potentiate the therapeutic effect of antileishmanial drugs.

Congratulations to all of the winners for their excellent work, and we wish them continuing success in their research!

From left to right: winners Rosa M Reguera (University of León) and Pablo Mesa-Antúnez (University of Malaga), NJC editor Denise Parent (CNRS Montpellier), organizer Rafael Gómez-Ramírez (University of Alcalá) and winner Franka Ennen (IFP Leibniz).