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!