DrugTech Scientific Advisory Board Site Visit

A week or so ago, we had the Scientific Advisory Board of our Research Community (DrugTech), visiting us for 2 days. I haven't seen the written report yet, but overall, I think we received good and constructive feedback. Nothing major that we didn't know already, but at least, they confirmed our concerns. Luckily, we were also able to show some good things about our scinece and Kuopio overall! 😀

 

A humble thank you for the Sigrid Juselius Foundation

Last week I received very nice news from Sigrid Juselius Foundation when they announced their 2025 research grants. This was my last 3/3 part for the project that started in 2023 related organic anion polypeptides (OATPs) and microglia-targeting in the brain. A lot has been achieved with this funding within the past 2 years, but a lot is still to be done. Hopefully, it will lead to several publications afterwards.

So a humble thank you for the Sigrid Juselius Foundation (more information about the grants behind this link)! Like I have previously posted, this foundation has been our long-lasting supporter, already from 2015, so 10 years in a row! I'm just speedless! 💝

Organic Synthesis Class has started

It is that time of the academic year when we have our "Organic Synthesis Laboratory Work" going on. This year, we have a nice amount of participants, 8 students, although there were couple of last minute cancellations, unfortunately. Anyway, I'm only coordinating the course, and Santosh is doing the hard work with the students. But we alredy have obtained the first products and on the upcoming week, they will start with their project works, which are now formulated as mystery boxes. There is a different story behind each and every project, and the students have to "save the world" by synthesizing the magic compound. 😄 Let's see how well they will be doing the job...

 

New man in house!

This week our newest group member started as a Ph.D. student, so welcome Mikko to the them! Not the best week to start, if the boss is not around, but it's better to get used to it! 😂 So Mikko will be doing both modelling and synthesis, and who knows perhaps some analytics also later?!? The project will be a combination of the new cardiac creatine delivery (with J&A. Erkko Funding) and PREP-PP2A ligand development in collaboration and co-supervision with Maija (with her recent HPC funding). But perhaps we hear more about the projects as they proceed.

Mikko just recently had his M.Sc. thesis seminar, and we hope that you can graduate soon and get rid of the timecard that you need to use as an assistant, before bocoming as a researcher.

 

We also finally had some group activity, good old bowling, but due to my sickness I wasn't able to join, unfortunately! But I'm eagerly waiting to join you for the next one! It seemed that you had a great time together!