Synthesis class is over!

The Spring semester requires always huge efforts with the synthesis course, and now it is over. Thank you Santosh, for your output on this class, I think today, as a last day, the student were still smiling, so well done! I think we achieved overall 6 pure final products, 1 intermediate, and 1 final product that needs to be purified, so not bad from 7 students in 10 days! And most of all, knowledge and skills were adopted and we will see if some of the students was so inspired that wants to continue with a master thesis. Well, at least this course have given the maturity to do a master thesis project in the synthesis lab! Well, almost anything in life... 😂

Thank You for Sigrid Juselius!

This week we got great news, when Sigrid Juselius Foundation announced their grants (link). Yes, we got the continuation and second year for our last years' project. With this funding we are albe to cover salaries partly for 2 Ph.D. students and most importantly, we will be able to unravel new transporter-mediated drug delivery routes into the brain and within the brain to specific cell types (microglia). And hopefully this all will then some day lead to better drugs for different brain diseases and relief for the patient suffering from those. 

Like, one colleague who contact me recently said after couple of emails: "When you do crack the BBB problem and show it in dogs/monkeys please call me since as you know this is one of the biggest opportunities in CNS drug development!" Well, we definitely will try our best and with the prestigious support from foundations, we are at least getting closer!

Teaching in the Synthesis Lab

It is again that time of the year when we are having Organic Synthesis Laboratory course in our research labs. This year, all the students were exceptionally all Finnish-speaking, but since Santosh is the main teacher in the lab, the course will be fully in English. During the following weeks, the students will do a project work (in pairs and different from each others) that includes several synthesis steps, purification of the synthesized compounds, and structural analysis of the intermediates and the final products by NMR. In the real research lab, the students will be challenged with problem-solving abilities and most importantly learn to use equipment related to the organic chemistry independently and working safely taking into a consideration all the risk issues.

People come and go...

I probably never get used to the fact that people just come and go in a research group. Of course everyone leaves a memories behind. This time, Sara has finished her experimental part of her Master Thesis, and will focus the rest of the semester for other courses and writing the thesis in Kuopio, but sadly leaving the rest of us. It was a challenging project with Sara, but at the end, I think we managed to get something in our hands and after all we all learned a lot. So thank you Sara for you hard efforts and good luck for the future! 😀