Teaching, teaching, teaching

At this time of year, most of us are teaching in the basic courses. I started this year lecturing an old course called Organic Chemistry - 4 ECTS points, for almost 100 students in the class with different backgrounds, varying from pharmacy to biomedicine and even environmental sciences. But I guess the main challenge for me has been the technical issues of recording the lectures at the same time, since number of technical issues I have faced in each lecture hall so far has been quite huge... 😂 But I have enjoyed, lots of ideas already how to improve it for the next year, and we are not even in a half way yet!

Janne's 2. publication out!

We got really goods new last week and the final process was very fast, so the publication number 2 for Janne's Ph.D. thesis is now out! Congratulations Janne and thanks for all the co-authors for your great contribution! 🌹 The publication under the title "The L-type amino acid transporter 1 enhances drug delivery to the mouse pancreatic beta cell line (MIN6) (link, open access)" was published in prestigious European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and continued Janne's work on LAT1 transporter expression and utilization in pancreatic beta-cells. So from the 1. publication's tissue level, we proceeded on the cellular level. 

Personally I find the correlation between in vitro cellular uptake and in vivo pancreatic accumulation of our LAT1-utilizing prodrugs (of several non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) as the most fascinating result, but of course Janne made great work with the prodrugs, and showed that they were able to revert cytokine-induced effects on insulin secretion, and balance other biomarkers, identified in global proteomic analysis that were measured by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). So great work and lots of things learned for the future!

New semester, new students

Since the early September, we have have several new students in our group. From the ERASMUS student this year we have Simone from the University of Rome (Italy) working with Santosh on the synthesis of new OATP-utilizing prodrugs for brain-targeting purposes; Maria from the University of Barcelona (Spain) working with the HPLC methods and stability and cellular uptake studies of novel metformin derivatives targeted to cancer cells; and Olivia from the Aix-Marseille University (France), working with Hamed on the evaluation of OATP-utilizing brain-targeted prodrugs. And then we also have Lina, already a postdoc, but studying additionally in a toxicology master programme and performin a master thesis with us by comparing the NMR and MS metabolic profiles in different set-ups. Not to forget that we are supervising with Adela and Aaro one master student Milka, and with Ville another master students Juuso, who should also start soon the modelling and Daria, who is already finishing her modelling studies. Did I forget someone... most likely yes, and there will be new students joining us later this year... 😎