Slap change

I probably haven't remembered to say that Judith from Pretoria finished her project on vitamin analysis and has already left us, but to keep the wheels turning, a new student is already in the house! Dinaly from the University of Poitiers (France) has already started to work with Mikko in the synthesis of ADAM-17 (or TACE) inhibitors and perhaps also their prodrugs. I look forward to how many new compounds we are able to get, as this project has been stuck after Mikko's Master's Thesis, and the aim was to publish the series one day. Fingers crossed! I was also a little bit jealous about the lab coat that she had with her... 😂

And since there is going to be a big change in the group composition in the near future, it was a nice surprise from Adela to remember to celebrate also personal days and achievements! At the end of the day, that's all that matters, to be happy together for better and worse!

Happy Easter!

Past weeks, I have been preparing a new version for the Research Council of Finland's Proof-of-Concept Call, which is a specific call that one can apply for max years after the finalized project. I tried that last year, got good reviews, grading 5/6, but not funded. So I improved the points that were raised and thought that now it's much better and perhaps I may have a chance. However, I decided to ask for a second opinion, from my good friend, an artificial intelligence, and together with the evaluation criteria, (s)he thought that it was everything else than good.

Well, then I thought since (s)he seems to know it much better than I do, let's use the advice. I spent 3 days refining my proposal and I must admit, I learned more than any consultant (paid ones) has ever taught me. I'm not saying that this solves all the problems, and I will now get the funding, but perhaps, I want to encourage responsible use of AI. There is nothing wrong with using it, but it cannot do the whole job for you. You have to make the starting point on your own. I have recently seen a Master's Thesis, fully written by AI, and yes, as a supervisor, it is frustrating that the student doesn't even remove the most obvious signs of AI-written text. So I don't advise on that, but at the end of the day, (s)he can be your friend and help you out on things that you don't master that well!

Have a Happy Easter!

We Are Part of Biocenter Kuopio & Finland

Something that I have probably forgotten to mention is that from the beginning of 2026, we have been part of Biocenter Kuopio. And "we" means here Medicinal Chemistry & Organic Synthesis (MCOS) unit, which was accepted as a node of the Biocenter Finland's platform called Drug Discovery and Chemical Biology (DDCB) consortium (headed by Prof. Päivi Tammela, University of Helsinki). DDCB coordinates infrastructure and expertise in the areas of drug discovery and chemical biology, and makes it available to the scientific community.

So, we provide services from early-stage drug discovery, through lead optimization, to highly potent novel target-based clinical drug candidates that have fine-tuned pharmacokinetic properties, by using computational drug design, medicinal chemistry, and bioanalytical methods, together with the Drug Design & Molecular Modeling (DDMM) partnering node.

MCOS unit is also part of the roadmap for national research infrastructures in Finland (FIRI2024), which is a partner of EU-OPENSCREEN European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), which, in turn, supports academic researchers and companies aiming to utilise chemical biology tools to advance basic research or early drug discovery projects. I probably also forgot to mention about that one last year. Well, 70% of our part of the RCF-funding was cut, but let's hope we can still get some new instrument investment with that funding soon!

 

 

And the service has started nicely, we already have the first supported publication out! 🙌 Well, the biggest acknowledgement for that goes to Janne and our UPLC (not in the figure though)!