Congratulations Adela!

We got finally good news, Adela's first paper for her Ph.D. thesis is now out! It was a long process to find a suitable journal, but we didn't give up, and the reward tastes so good! Originally, the idea for this paper and the design of the main prodrug (which is a paracetamol derivative) came from our past Ph.D. student Ahmed, but since everything from the synthisis until the final evaluation took more time than expected and he already had 3 publications for his Ph.D. thesis, Adela took a bigger role and finalized it. But at the end, like all the publications, it is a huge group effort, so thank you for all the co-authors! 

 

So the article itself titled as "A novel paracetamol derivative alleviates lipopolysaccharide-induced neuroinflammation (link to the publication, open access)" was finally publiced in European Journal of Pharmacology -jounal and it descibes a novel LAT1-utilizing prodrug of 4-aminophenol (the active compound of paracetamol, since paracetamol itself is also a prodrug) that was more effective in reducing brain prostaglandin E2 (PGE2, an inflammation marker) levels than paracetamol. And what was the most interesting to us, was the novel biomarkers related to neuroinflammation that we were able to identify from the brain that this prodrug treatment changed, and most importantly these were totally different that paracetamol affected in the brain, which were not related to the alleviation of neuroinflammation at all. Interesting indeed!

 

Group Meetings

This year, we decided to change our group meetings a bit. So far we have had a weekly morning coffees, just to catch up, who is doing waht, and if there would be something that someone else can help in troublehooting things. But as suggested in the developmental discussion, we started to have now also monthly scinetific group meetings, each one of us presenting one project in time and its most recent achievements. So far, I have liked it a lot. Although the presenters are mainly Ph.D. students, I believe the undergraduates also benefit a lot from them and get a bigger picture of all the multidisciplinary science that is all the time going on in our group. This week, it was all about OATPs - organic anion transporting polypeptides by Hamed and Simone, and last month, it was SMVT's turn - sodium multivitamin transproter by Adela and Ville. 

 

I got a great idea during the Christmas break... well I don't know was it that good at the end, but yes, I decided to give my brain some break and I bought a puzzle. And yes, not an easy one, 1500 pieces... I thought I would got some help at home, but no, I basically pull it all together by myself. Took couple of weeks... But I must admit, even though I got a bitt addicted to solve it, it was good and relaxing. So I can warmly recommend to anyone suffering from stress, to try a puzzle as a reliever.