New Review in Inflammopharmacology

Even though I'm not a specialist in rheumatoid arthritis, I was somehow involved in a review dealing its intracellular pathways. A long story short: Sherihan, the corresponding author visited my lab as a predoctoral sutdent in 2018 with ERASMUS funding. She did a great job with astrocytes-targeted transporter-utilizing prodrugs of ferulic acid that were able to multifunctional effects ameliorating inflammation and oxidative stress in the brain, and that resulted in a nice paper in Oxidative Medicine Cellular Longevity in 2019 (link here). 

As Sherihan is also a hard-working mom, she came up an idea of writing a review of intracellular signalling pathways in rheumatoid arthritis after her Ph.D. graduation, since this was also a topic of her thesis, and she kindly asked me to co-author. So I was honor to work with her, as she really did the main job in writing and I just enhanced the messages and fine-tuned the storyline. So now I'm proud to present that this review has been published now in a journal called Inflammopharmacology (link here to the publication).

Busy week with online congresses

For some reason, this third week of March has been very popular with online events. I was invited to have a talk in 12th Drug Delivery and Formulation Summit that was held in 15-17th of March. Then also Neurocenter Finland and FICANWest (Western Finland Cancer Centre) jointly hosted a nice webinar on the afternoon of 16th of March, and finally there was also a Nordic POP ("Unique Nordic University Hub for Patient Orientated Products") Annual Meeting on 16-17th of March. So basically I was jumping from the event to event and from the presentation to presentation to hear all the most interesting ones for me. Afterward thinking, this would have never been possible to do, if these events were organized in their original places, in Berlin, Uppsala and Turku. So something good has definitely came out of the COVID-19 pandemic!

 

I must admit that the technology has also improved. DDF Summit used a platform called SwapCard, and I found it really nice! All the presentations were streamed (it was seen that purple window), so in the zoom, there was only me, the moderator and the technical support (and the counting clock), so it really felt like I was on a TV show! :) But actually I enjoyed a lot, even though I wasn't able to see or hear my audience. NordicPOP had AppInConf platform, which I didn't find as handy as the SwapCard, but then again, the ideology was the same and perhaps more money was used to organize DDF Summit than NordicPOP. These were also good experiences, as we are also going to host a NordicPOP event in next August! I will post more about it closer to that event!

Microwave-assisted green chemistry

We have had a microwave synthesizer in our organic chemistry lab for 15 years now, but last year, approximately at this time of year (before COVID-19 lockdown), it was broken, and we had to let it go, it couldn't be fixed anymore. We were very sad, since these days it is really hard to get finding to buy any new equipment. The founders expect that the infrastructure and facilities are already there. Luckily, we have this infrastructure-related strategic funds given by the Faculty every year, but the competition between the departments is hard and of course the amount per year is not that big. Anyway, I bravely applied it, and to my and everyone's else surprise, we got the funding for the new microwave synthesizer before end of the year 2020. Then all the formalities took place, we had to make a tender and so on, but luckily again for us, there was only one supplier who was able to give an offer and thus we accepted it. It was the same brand which we had already, so no big surprises, I hope! 😏

So after one year, which I think was pretty fast in this case, we have now the microwave synthesizer up and running again! One thing I think made the decision faster in the faculty is the fact that this is our future, green chemistry! The microwave saves power, water flow, gives higher yields of synthesized products with lower yields of unwanted side products, which makes the purification step's solvent waste lower, etc, etc. 

So I'm very happy to that I was able to make my contribution, so that we can continue to carry out our green chemistry!

Some projects are long-lasting

The text below was originally posted in March 2021 or so, but the blogger removed it, because inappropriate content! OK, I've got it, it was done by a robot, since it was then restored by the blogger team. In future, I need to select my words more wisely! 😂

 ---------------------------

I had an idea a long time ago, I cannot recall it exactly, but somewhere around 2012-2013. Then we needed to get a funding to execute the idea, that actually took relatively short period of time, as we were able to include that idea to a part of a grant that was about the be awarded at the same time in 2014. Then the real work started. After failed attempts, we finally gained a lot of nice data during 2015-2016, but the original hypothesis was not met, which meant that the publications was very hard to conclude or even write about, not to mention how hard it was to be accepted and published. Well, the most of the time we spend thinking how to pull everything together, and that took roughly 3 years. 😆 OK, I think everyone of us just wanted to forgot the project. But in 2019, we activated and started to write the manuscript and in 2020 we submitted the first version, which gained a lot of critic, of course, but I must thank for the reviewers, as this time (which definitely doesn't happen too often these days) we got a very constructive feedback that help us a lot to improve the content of the manuscript. And to our surprise the second attempt only the the second journal choice of us (International Journal of Pharmaceutics) was successful and this paper is now out to be read, in 2021. So from the idea to published results and communication, it took 8-9 years. But well done team! Thank you for all the co-authors for your efforts, mainly to the corresponding one, Aaro!

If you want to find out what is was all about, the final conclusion was that there is species differences in intrabrain distribution of L-type amino acid transporter 1 (LAT1)-utilizing prodrugs between mice and rats, but mainly because of the expression and localization of bioconverting enzymes rather than expression levels of LAT1 in the brain. 

See more from this link.