NordicPOP meets FinPharmaNet

This week we had the virtual workshop NordicPOP "New Frontiers in Prodrug and Bioconjugate Development & Continuous Processing" combined with 15th Annual FinPharmaNet Meeting (for the Finnish Phamaceutical Ph.D. students). We had such a honor to have such a great speakers with astonishing presentations, so thank you all for your contribution! At the peak moments there was nearly 150 attendees, so well done for such a specific topics and among the small society that this event was advertised.

At the end it also was hard work from the organizing committee, so than you also colleaqeus for putting this together! It was great to hear from the speakers' side that it is amazing that we can offer this kind of events and expert lectures for our Ph.D. student, despite the current pandemic situation. Of course, the original plan was to have a real-life event, but we needed to decide very early how to continue with organizing everything, and I think it was very wise decision in March to stay online one more time. 

 

So now I'm full of energy and inspired from other scientists' work to continue my own work! 😀

 

New Erasmus student from the Bradford University

As the semester has now started, well officially it starts in the beginning of the September, but some teaching starts already in August, we have also received our first ERASMUS students. It is nice that these opportunities are still available for students despite the on-going pandemic. Our first student, Sania is from the University of Bradford, UK. Funny thing is that she will work in the project for which we have got compounds years ago from the same university. So circle is closed! 😀 I hope we can finally get good results and put the period for this project, meaning writing finally a paper out of it, but we'll see how the results turned out to be! 

Back to the business

The summer holiday is almost over for all of us now and I hope everyone had a nice break! I know that I had, since I was struggling to get motivated to start to work again, and those who know me well, it's pretty unusual! 😎 During my holidays, I, of course had to submit one grant application that was announced just few days before my holidays and typical to my summer holidays, take care of one manuscript revision. But luckily, we got it done, thanks to the active co-authors (!) and here you can read about our latest achievements. Its about anti-viral drug ganciclovir and how its use together with another chemotherapeutic drug, methotrexate, can improve cytotoxic effects in cancer cells, since ganciclovir inhibits a specific efflux proteins and thus methotrexate from transporting out of the cancer cells. 

Read the paper from this link (open access)

We have a lot coming on in the next months also. Firstly, we are organizing an online conference, under the NordicPOP University Hub called "Prodrug technology and Continuous processing workshops & Meeting with FinPharmaNet for graduate students" on 26-27th of August, 2021. There is still time to register for the event, so please have a look on the schedule and see the great speakers who we are hosting, at least for the prodrug part:

Click here for the schedule 

So, see you online soon!