Transporter Review

I was honored to write a review article of  with our visiting Professor and world leading expert in proteomics Professor Tetsuya Terasaki, to journal called "Pharmaceutical Research" last year, and now this review has been accepted and published. It is a part of special issue "Translational Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics in CNS and Beyond" dedicated to Emerita Professor Margareta Hammarlund-Udenaes, former Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Head of the Translational Pharmacokinetics/ Pharmacodynamics Department at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Here is the link to the review and it is open access for everyone to be read! So enjoy! 😀 The review tells everything that one needs to know about "Pharmacoproteomics of Brain Barrier Transporters and Substrate Design for the Brain Targeted Drug Delivery". The latter part (substrate design) was my input!

 

 

With this link you can access the other articles of the special issue.

Deepest Gratitude for Sigrid Juselius Foundation!

I have been lucky to receive a grant from Sigrid Juselius Foundation, once again! I'm very honored to have this yearly allowed grant from the year 2015 on, and totally Sigrid Juselius Foundation has supported our research by 360 000 euros so far. So greatest acknowledgements for the Foundation. This has really kept us going and produced several publications and soon also one Ph.D. thesis! Let's just hope that our work is worth of further funding in the future!  😀

Work that won't suck

When I was building up my research group, I probably got the worst advice that a new group leader can get. I was hesitating in hiring a person, who didn't have the skills that were required for the job I was hiring the person, but this person was perfect match to my team, spiritually. The advice was that at this stage of my career, I shouldn't have afford to hire anything else than the most skillful researchers. Otherwise I will fail as a group leader. I didn't take this advice at that time, I hired this person, but this advice affected me a lot later on, and I tried to follow it just to realize that how bad advice that was. Lately, I have seen a lot of funny advertisements, mainly in Linked-In, stating just the opposite; don't hire the skills or knowledge, hire the attitude, and based on my own experience also from this kind of opposite behavior, this is so true! I'm sure there are a lot of books, seminars and everything else on this topic, and I don't feel that I have to study about it, I just need to listen my instincts better in the future! 

 

Recently, I carried out a recruitment for the Jane and Aatos Erkko Funding that I received recently, and my choice of the best possible candidate was obvious. After interviews, I selected a person that I already knew, as she was here last autumn as an ERASMUS student, did great job, but most importantly show me an open-minded attitude, great team-working and communication skills, those that I liked to work with and to have in my team. So I look forward for the next autumn, when Adela starts her Ph.D. in our group! 😀

 

Figure by Akka Architects

Organic Synthesis Laboratory Work- course

Annual Organic Synthesis Laboratory Work -course (that I'm directing and teaching) has started again in Pharmaceutical Chemistry discipline. In this class, the students will prepare novel drug molecules by themselves. And not any random molecules, these compounds will be later used in the research at the School of Pharmacy! One of the main learning outcomes of this course is to apply the principles of “green chemistry”, which means that the compounds will be prepared according to sustainable development and the students learn e.g., to use microwave-assisted synthesis (first figure) to speed up the reaction and improve the yields (not forgetting that this method saves energy and water consumption, to name few).