This week, our research community DrugTech was happy to host a Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) consisting wide variety of pharmaceutical experts from academia and industry. All the DrugTech principal investigators (PIs) gave presentations to SAB and in a return, received valuable and constructive feedback on how to develop the science and research in the future.
We have received a great news today, Hamed has been awarded with 1-year UEF graduate school position (funding) for the next year, so congratulations Hamed! 😀 And even Andy, you did a great job as a beginner having the position in the waiting list. It was a great week to get back to work with you guys!
Since I had a chance to take some time off "out of the office", I also had a chance to read a book that I bought already 1 year ago. It probably is the best book of the last year (2021): Adam Grant's Think Again. In this book Adam's describes how powerful tool the ability of re-thinking is and he mentions many times that scientists have this ability. But I must disagree with Adam, yes some of us do have it, but that is also something that we learn to do and will learn until the end. I takes an effort, so we shouldn't take it for granted for having the ability to re-think, just because we are scientist, but we should highly value it.
This also brought another related issue in my mind, that I discovered couple of years ago, the power of not knowing yet. I came across a very good speech in youtube, but I cannot find it anymore, as I don't remember the presenter, but by googling you can find a lot of interesting writings and videos of the topic. So I think this is also another important feature of the scientist, to understand that more we explore, the more we understand how little we actually understand. But that's the great driving force in the science!
We are very happy and excited to announce the 5'th Scandinavian Blood-brain Barrier Network Symposium, which will be organized together with UEF Doctoral Programmes in Drug Research (DPDR) and Molecular Medicine (DPMM) as a Ph.D. Course with a topic: Brain Drug Delivery Methods & Models to Study Brain Diseases
19-20.1.2023, at Kuopio campus, Medistudia 302 auditorium (Finland).
The symposium is free of charge for academic participants and open for attendance not only by Ph.D. students, but also by postdocs and senior scientists inside or outside of the academia.
Registration is required and there are only limited spots available.
More information: https://sites.uef.fi/sbbn-symposium-2023/
Although autumn has really arrived with bugs and cold whether, we had a superior week. Janne got his first publication accepted and it is already published. So this will be part of Janne's Ph.D. thesis that will consist of 3 original first author publications that is the requirement in UEF Ph.D. degrees, in addition to the thesis itself, the public defense and 30 ECTS credit points of postgraduate studies.
Anyway, this paper was published in a prestigious journal called Molecular Pharmaceutics, and with this publication Janne proved that L-type amino acid transporter 1 (LAT1)-utilizing prodrugs of ferulic acid (strong antioxidant among other beneficial effects) can be accumulated into the mouse pancreas due to the high LAT1 expression in pancreatic tissue. This also improved the the ability of ferulic acid to decrease lipid peroxidation and prostaglandin E2 production in the pancreas. Moreover, the prodrugs were hemocompatible and thus, relatively safe to use. Since we have previously shown that these LAT1-utilizing antioxidant prodrugs are also delivered into the brain, they could have beneficial dual effects in the diseases that have overlapping pathological changes, such as Alzheimer's disease and diabetes mellitus. Well, proving that will be the next step for Janne to accomplish... so congratulation, and good luck! 😁
Link to the publication (PubMed).
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