This Year's First Publication and Funding!

The year has started as usually, hectically, but at least things are moving on. New manuscripts are submitted as well as research funding proposals. And on the other site of the tube, something is also coming out; the publication of this year from our BNCT (Boron Neutron Capture Therapy) consortium. In this paper we present another series of glucoconjugates. Juulia and Ahmed, our Ph.D. students made the biggest effort for this publication, so we are extremely proud of your contribution! 

 

See the full publication from this link.

I also received the first funding of the year, hopefully not the last one either, from Päivikki and Sakari Sohlberg's Foundation, so Thank you for that. Together with Prof. Tetsuya Terasaki, who is now in Kuopio we have laready initiated several interesting projects and this funding guarantees that new knowledge is created that helps us to develop better drugs in the future!

See all the granted projects (unfortunately only in Finnish).

DrugTech Research Community

Roughly a year ago, we were kind of forced to think our strategic plans for the future at the UEF, as we were asked to form multidisciplinary research communities (RC), which were then evaluated for their activities for the period of 2015-2018. At the beginning there was a lot of hassle; can one researcher belong to several communities, etc. But that wasn't allowed, at least for the evaluation period, which was kind of weird as most of us and our work does not sit into only one category. I and my group ended up to belong to a community called first as "Platform for Drug Discovery and Delivery Technologies (PDDT)" that was established by Prof. Arto Urtti from the School of Pharmacy. Later on, we re-named us as "DrugTech" and from the evaluation we got a really good feedback (numerically 6/6)! In the community there is ca. 20 principal investigators (PIs) and it total we are approximately 100 researchers from pharmaceutical, medicinal and natural sciences. This week we had the first kick-off meeting, in which the PIs presented the current activities and the future prospects and we discussed new ideas and collaborative projects. I really look forward to our next evaluation period, as we already have a really good interactions going on. :)

 

Happy New Year 2021!

A relaxing Christmas break is behind now and only one semi-urgent task arrived to my email, funnily on Christmas Eve; an email from the Editor that our manuscript could be considered to be published after revision. So I guess this is a classical example when Editors are working, as most of them does the job after regular duties. Anyway, the corrections were not that bad, I have already address mots of them, so let's keep our fingers crossed for the first publication of this year!

The first days of the year are also the most quiet during the whole year, and therefore I have had time to start drafting a new manuscript. This has been on my table forever, several years, so I'm so happy to see to finalize this project finally. But of course, as quite often happens when I start to draft a manuscript, I want to confirm few additional studies, so let's hope we can submit this during the first quarter of 2021. 

So figuratively, if the year 2020 was the Christmas tree on the left, let's hope that the year 2021 will be the right-hand one. Happy and Successful New Year to Everyone!