Couple of new reviews out too!

During the summer, we also got one review article out, written together with our Polish collaborator, Magdalena. This paper, entitled "Beyond epilepsy: The expanding role of valproic acid in Alzheimer disease therapy - a review" (link), was a systematic review on all the possibilities that the classical epileptic drug valproic acid can have, e.g., against neurodegenerative diseases, and it was published in a well-appreciated The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

But recently, we also got acceptance on another systematic review that was written in a collaboration with Prof. Jaana Rysä's group, entitled "Chemical disruption of placental thyroid hormone signalling: a systematic review that highlights sex‑specific effects" (link). This was published in a very prestigious journal, Archives of Toxicology, and the greatest acknowledgment goes to the first author, Julia Swan, who put all the pieces together! 

Biocenter Finland Day

Last Wednesday I was participating in Biocenter Finland Day, where we, the platform representatives, met the scientific advisory board (SAB). Since I am a newbie in our Drug Discovery and Chemical Biology platform (DDCB, led by Prof. Päivi Tammela from Helsinki University), this was the first time I had the privilege to be part of this very big but crucial network of infrastructure that we luckily have in Finland. The funny thing was that the question of sufficient medicinal chemistry support and service in Finland was raised immediately, since I was the only one who represented that part (other platform members give all kind of screening services). And the answer is simple and short, no, it is not, we need more, especially if we want Finland to be globally competitive in medical innovations. But at least, this is a huge step for me, our group, and the School of Pharmacy at the UEF, but I hope it is only the first step and others will follow!

The other funny thing was that several of us who came from Kuopio said the same thing, it is nice to get out of Kuopio to finally meet F2F the colleagues and collaborators from Kuopio. 😍

Semester finally started

Our university had the Opening Ceremony of the Academic Year, a couple of days ago. Despite the invitation, I skipped it, since I had much more important this to do; to welcome the new students who are working in our group for this semester. The first one was Unna, who started her master's thesis in our OATP-project doing bioanalytics (bioconversion and cellular uptake studies of novel OATP2B1-utilizing prodrugs), followed by Riina, a pharmacology student supervised by Aaro, but working within the same project with Unna, but instead of in vitro studies, doing the in vivo studies. Also, Jerry will start on the following week with the synthesis of novel brain-targeted PP2A-prodrugs, and we will also get 3 ERASMUS students soon, the first one Bradley from UK already visited us, and he will start also working on the synthesis of TACE or ADAM17-inhibitors with Mikko, also next week, but he will later on also do some modelling with butyrylcholinesterase.

Let's hope that after a couple of months, I have something to report from the projects! 😍 Some of us, was also able to finally use the new beach volley court in front of the Mediteknia. Let's see if we can replay our game against modellers outside before it gets too chilly...

New beginnings

A week or so ago, Hamed and Mikko (for the first time) attended the NordicPOP annual and closing meeting in Copenhagen among the UEF Pharmacy colleagues. We have been very grateful for the NordicPOP consortium (link) organized by Jukka Rantanen at the University of Copenhagen, and of course, the main funder, NordForsk. It has covered a lot of our Nordic scientific interactions, mainly in the form of organizing and attending symposia, but we have also recently been able to set up a new collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark, but perhaps, more updates about that a little bit later... From later on this year, the consortium will continue under a new name NordicPharmaTrain (link) as an abbreviation for Nordic Pharmaceutical Translation and Innovation. Looking forward to see what else it can bring to us! 😎