New Master Student Heidi has started

During the past week, our latest Master student, Heidi also joined us and started her experimental work of the thesis. She will be working with the Piezo1 project, analyzing the Jedi1 and Jedi2 prodrugs that Andy has synthesized. These are designed to utilize OATP1C1 for their brain and cellular delivery, instead of LAT1, which we recently published. And once reached the target site, they should activate Piezo1 ion channel. Let's see how we proceed with these plans... 😎

And the press release from our SMVT paper also went out last week:

https://www.uef.fi/en/article/new-transport-pathway-shows-promise-for-brain-drug-delivery

FIBTRA virtual symposium

Note, if you are interested, tomorrow there will be a virtual symposium on the main topic of “Present and future of brain tumor modeling and clinical translation”, organized by the Finnish Brain Tumor Research Association (FIBTRA). It will be held in the afternoon, so feel free to sit on the sofa, take some refreshments, and just listen to these amazing speakers. You can get the link upon registration.

Speaking of amazing people, it is nice to be surrounded and supported by fantastic workmates, who also want to cheer you up, when things go wrong... Afterall, we all want to do our best and most of us also want to give our best for the benefit of others as well.

Applied Organic Chemsitry lectures has stated!

My heaviest teaching period has already started, 30 h of organic chemistry and how the knowledge can be applied in our modern society. I like to use activating elements in my lectures, as the talking itself is pretty boring to me too. 😂 This year I was able to spread the lectures a bit further apart from each other, so that the students would have more time to absorb the content of the lectures and practise the homework that helps them understand. But after the first period (10 h), I already see so many things to be improved for the next year...

This year we were also successful with 4th-year student recruitment; 17 out of 66 students selected Pharmaceutical Chemistry as their specialization field. And as a head, I'm more than happy and warmly welcome all of you to this fascinating branch of pharmacy that views things through chemical lenses. At the same time, this means a lot more study guidance for me... 😎 But it says something about the interests of young ones and their prospects for the future!