Be Sensei of your own life

I don't read that much book during my free time, mainly cause I'm not sure if I have any 😁 and since I don't get relaxed by reading, as I have to do it for my living so much. However, every now and then I read something, during the vacations, and sometimes if I have less busy weekend. I found a really great book from our local library, it has been published only recently, and unfortunately, currently it is only in Finnish, a book called "Be Sensei of Your Own Life - The Road of Black Belt to Good Life (translated by me)". 

After reading this book, I realized that my values are close to the values obeyed in karate. The book chapters were divided based on each color of the belts and they were:

• White belt - Authenticity
• Yellow belt - Respect
• Orange belt - Self image
• Green belt - Communication
• Blue belt - Balance
  
• Purple belt - Creativity
• Brown belt - Beauty
• Black belt - Modesty

So now I once again, understood better my behavior as a leader, supervisor and mentor, for which the student's have so often thanked me for, since I always say "Don't be afraid to fail, be afraid not to try!"  And I also value a lot the thought that we all are incomplete and that the life is a journey of learning, also for me. These were the issues among many others that were dealt in the book via nice conversion of mentor and mentee. So if you agree with this ideology, I'm happy to work with you! 😎

The week of gratitude

This week has been amazing. First of all, I've got vaccinated! In Kuopio, we have mass vaccinations at Kuopio hall, which is sport and multipurpose hall, and it has been reserved for this, I guess for the rest of the year. There was about 20 small cabins for pre-booked customers over 40 years old, but of course no cameras was allowed, so a bit hard to describe. Nice music was played and as I entered to the hall, the overwhelmed feeling was the relief, we have waited for this over year and now I was one of the luckiest to get it, and for free! When I was leaving I had to take a photo from the floor which stated I've got the vaccination! So when it's your turn, use this opportunity! It's the only way we will get it in the control!

This week was also a time of nice pay-back, I decided to bring some cake to celebrate not only the received Academy of Finland funding, but also return of one of the group members, who has had a longer sick leave. And to my surprise these wonderful group members brought me flowers, chocolate and  sparkling wine! I was, again, speechless! I wanted to celebrate the group effort and hard work during the past year and difficult time, but instead they put me in the spotlight, in which I 'm not get used to be at... 

2 Finished Master Thesis Projects

The semester 2020-2021 is about to be over and this semester, we had a pleasure to have 2 master thesis students, Miia and Lotta, working in our team. Both studied the same topic, protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) activators but from the different angle. Miia's thesis topic was "Design and synthesis of new PP2A-protein activators" and Miia did some computational modeling and design of novel PP2A activators under Dr. Maija Lahtela-Kakkonen's supervision, and then she combined her findings and synthesized 4 novel compounds in our lab. Lotta's thesis topic instead was" PP2A enzyme as a potential drug target in cancer" and she studied the LAT1-utilizig prodrugs of PP2A activators that out last semester master thesis student Aki, prepared in his thesis, their stability and enzymatic activation as well as some affinity studies with LAT1. However, these were one of the trickiest compounds I have face for a long time, by their physicochemical properties, and Lotta spent a lot of time just developing sample preparation methods and HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) methods to analyze the exact concentrations of these compounds and their released parent drugs in each biological samples. And as some of you may have picked up from the earlier posts that PP2A is a very interesting drug target, since it is one of the key enzymes preventing tau hyperphosphorylation in neurodegenerative diseases as well as functions as tumor suppressor. Therefore a brain- and tumor- targeted LAT1-utilizing prodrugs may have important implications towards these diseases.

Anyway, I'm very thankful for your contribution, we will continue from here, and hopefully, some day you will see you work published in a scientific journal!