Year has gone by with very sad atmosphere

It is really heart breaking to think that the situation in Europe has been so cruel for one year now. There is no words to describe how sorry the rest of the world is and we will try to do everything to help people in Ukraine. However, since this is a science blog for general audience, I thought to update how this all has affected the research in our case. Note, this is not to complain or compare it with people suffering directly from the war, this is more like an example how everything is affected.

1. The number of discussion in the coffee table about the situation is countless. Peoples feelings have floated from desperation to even depression. Some of us has been able to somehow help via donations etc. but many of us just feel hopeless as we cannot change the situation.

2. Energy crisis, yes we have also been prepared for powercuts. There was announcement that there can be power shortages that are informed in advance but also those that can occur unexpectedly. That was shocking news to us, since many of our really expensive equipment, like NMRs and mass spectrometries cannot tolerate unexpected powercuts, they need to be run down in a controlled manner taking hours. Luckily, the winter has been relatively mild in temperature (not the amount of snow) this year, and so far we haven't suffered power shortages. But in the worst scenario, we should have closed down some of our activities. 

3. Prices has risen and budgeting-wisely, we have faced situations where we need to prioritize to some experiments and leave out something that was planned when the fundings were received. Of course, quite rarely science goes as planned, so in that sense, this is nothing that cannot be handled, but it annoys of course that we need to pay much more for something that was cheaper in that past.

4. Delivery of reagents and solvents has been delayed and in some cases, we have waited for months for something to arrive. This means delays in the overall research outputs, and with short-termed funding, we are not able to deliver results that has been planned in the research plan originally. Again, nothing new, that is pretty much the soul of the science, but again, annoying when you cannot keep up with your plans.

Of course there can be many other things, these just came to my mind with a quick thought. At the end I would like to congratulate Ukrainian chemical supplier Enamine, how well they have fight their ways out of the horror and find the ways to continue their trade.

Let's just hope the will be an ending soon and piece in the world! 💝

Good work team work will be rewarded!

Yep, another paper out! Hip-hip-hurray! A collaborative project with our Polish friend, Magdalena, has once again yielded a new publication. This time we were studying on how our newly synthesized metformin derivatives were affecting glucose-utilization and anti-coagulation as a dual acting compounds. This study under the title Substituent effects of sulfonamide derivatives of metformin that can dually improve cellular glucose utilization and anti-coagulation (link) was recently published in Chemico-Biological Interactions -journal and based on the gained results, we were able to identify 2 compounds out of 8, that bears this dual-property, while the other 6 were less promising. However, this gave us again a lot of information how we should structurally modify the metformin derivatives in the future. Notably, one of our last semester's M.Sc. student, Mira, was co-authoring in this paper, so in that sense, some results are so burning that they will be released much quicker that others... 😂

This week we also had a Friend's Day (Valentine's Day elsewhere), and therefore, it was great day to get together and celebrate the friendship of workmates! Sadly, one of us, Mara finished her ERASMUS period here in Kuopio today, and therefore we will thank you for you efforts and wish you a great chemistry-orientated future! 😄

 

Some work tasks are fun! For example this one, I was invited for an interview last year, by European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology, for their series of "I am a Medicinal Chemist/Chemical Biologist/Computational Chemist". Of course, it took a while to get it public and I must admit that I was laughing at the answers too after 8-9 months... 😄

Read the full interview behind this link!

Great Memories from January!

Like I promised, here are some great memories from the recent symposium that we had in Kuopio (Thank you Santosh for the great pics!). Since I also received a nice gift from our Swedish guests, a Dala horse, I also gave her a tour in our lab, so she would felt welcome and no so homesick here! 😄

Just to let you know and to save the date, we will have more fun also in the near future, as we are organizing the 6th Annual Meeting of Finnish Brain Tumor Research Association (FIBTRA) in Kuopio next autumn; 31st of August - 1st of September, 2023!

Link to the webpages, that will be updated for the scientific program soon!