Home sweet home

The last coference and research visit for this year was made by Santosh, who visited is Cape Town and Pretoria in South Africa couple of weeks ago. The joint meeting of the 23rd International Congress of the International Society for Ethnopharmacology and the 2nd International Congress of the African Phytomedicine Scientific Society (ISE-APSS 2024) conference and for the follow-up research visitwere successfull in both ways, our research was presented and novel approaches were and potential novel colloborations for the future were absorbed and now being incubated! 😎

 

 

Next one, will be then in Uppsala, the  SBBN (Scandinavian Blood-brain Barrier Network) meeting, that I have also been organizing. If you are interested in, I think there as still seats available! More information behing this link.

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!