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)!

 

Happiness of Research and Life in General!

It has been relatively busy weeks lately, not because of teaching, supervising, and all administrative stuff, but also in personal life. Anyway, this week Finland was once again (9th time in a row) ranked the happiest country in the world in the United Nations' World Happiness Report 2026. Well, I have many reasons to be professionally happy this week, as the Sigrid Juselis Foundation grants were published. Like I already said, words fall short when trying to express the deep gratitude and trust placed in our work. The Sigrid Jusélius Foundation has been one of the greatest and long-lasting supporters of our research for many years, and we are truly thankful for their continued confidence in what we do!

Nevertheless, the world's happiness nation statement makes you repeatedly wonder what is so special about us, after all, the polar nights get us quite depressed during the wintertime (now the daylight starts to be ok for normal people), but then again, soon we start to complain as it is too bright to sleep during the nights... 😂 Today, I also felt some kind of hapiness about the things that works nicely in our society, especially if you are unexpectedly left alone with the kids. Although the Finnish healthcare system has gone down, I must admit that we have received really good care. Of course, it is easy to say when you are living next to the university hospital, but still, as a single parent, I cannot complain at all. I'll take with gratitude all the help we can get and visit the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) over the lunch break, if needed. So if you have wondered, where the h... I have been all the time, in the hospital, probably more during the past 6 months than ever in my life... and still, we are just fine (routine operations)! And what I have learned during the past rough years, grief is not the opposite of happiness.