J Med Chem paper out

So, here it is, what I can proudly present, our recent publication in Journal of Medicinal Chemistry under a title "Targeting Glial Cells by Organic Anion-Transporting Polypeptide 1C1 (OATP1C1)-Utilizing l-Thyroxine-Derived Prodrugs". It should be open access, but since it still is in its early process (no full bibliographic details known yet), it may not be accessible for everyone, but here is the link anyway.

I'm so proud of Arun's and Hamed's work that they did together to make this happen, afterall this is the last paper for Arun's Ph.D. thesis and the first for Hamed's Ph.D. thesis. But of course, I'm very thankful for all co-authors for their great contribution. We did make a press release about it, so perhaps you can read more about the content of the publication from here (link).

A long story short, we made novel prodrugs from thyroxine and thyroxine derivatives that were able to carry anti-inflammatory drugs very effectively into the brain and glial cells within the brain via organic anions transporting polypeptide 1C1 (OATP1C1). And the brain delivery of these prodrugs were many times more efficient that their corresponding parent drugs (anti-inflammatory drugs, of course) but also more efficient than the corresponding L-type amino acids transporter 1 (LAT1)-utilizing prodrugs that we have studied in the past. So big leap forward to for future CNS-drug development! Of course the approach needs fine-tuning and we already are working with it, so more news coming from this topic also in the future!