Sport Afternoon 2025

This week, we had our biannual sports afternoon for students and staff members at the university. We decided to do something fun together, and went to mini-golf. The weather was bright but chilly, and one was barely able to put on without warm gloves. As there were so many of us, we decided to compete as teams against each other. So the average stroke per line per team member after 18 holes. I must admit we were pretty close to each other, and every team had an average stroke of less than 5! 😎 Anyway, nice time together with our group members, students, but also extended members, meaning other staff at the Pharmaceutical Chemistry discipline.  

P.S. Last days or evenings have been a great time for anyone visiting Kuopio long or short time, since the Auroras have been pretty active and easily visible.

Couple of new reviews out too!

During the summer, we also got one review article out, written together with our Polish collaborator, Magdalena. This paper, entitled "Beyond epilepsy: The expanding role of valproic acid in Alzheimer disease therapy - a review" (link), was a systematic review on all the possibilities that the classical epileptic drug valproic acid can have, e.g., against neurodegenerative diseases, and it was published in a well-appreciated The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

But recently, we also got acceptance on another systematic review that was written in a collaboration with Prof. Jaana Rysä's group, entitled "Chemical disruption of placental thyroid hormone signalling: a systematic review that highlights sex‑specific effects" (link). This was published in a very prestigious journal, Archives of Toxicology, and the greatest acknowledgment goes to the first author, Julia Swan, who put all the pieces together! 

Biocenter Finland Day

Last Wednesday I was participating in Biocenter Finland Day, where we, the platform representatives, met the scientific advisory board (SAB). Since I am a newbie in our Drug Discovery and Chemical Biology platform (DDCB, led by Prof. Päivi Tammela from Helsinki University), this was the first time I had the privilege to be part of this very big but crucial network of infrastructure that we luckily have in Finland. The funny thing was that the question of sufficient medicinal chemistry support and service in Finland was raised immediately, since I was the only one who represented that part (other platform members give all kind of screening services). And the answer is simple and short, no, it is not, we need more, especially if we want Finland to be globally competitive in medical innovations. But at least, this is a huge step for me, our group, and the School of Pharmacy at the UEF, but I hope it is only the first step and others will follow!

The other funny thing was that several of us who came from Kuopio said the same thing, it is nice to get out of Kuopio to finally meet F2F the colleagues and collaborators from Kuopio. 😍