New Erasmus student from the Bradford University

As the semester has now started, well officially it starts in the beginning of the September, but some teaching starts already in August, we have also received our first ERASMUS students. It is nice that these opportunities are still available for students despite the on-going pandemic. Our first student, Sania is from the University of Bradford, UK. Funny thing is that she will work in the project for which we have got compounds years ago from the same university. So circle is closed! 😀 I hope we can finally get good results and put the period for this project, meaning writing finally a paper out of it, but we'll see how the results turned out to be! 

Back to the business

The summer holiday is almost over for all of us now and I hope everyone had a nice break! I know that I had, since I was struggling to get motivated to start to work again, and those who know me well, it's pretty unusual! 😎 During my holidays, I, of course had to submit one grant application that was announced just few days before my holidays and typical to my summer holidays, take care of one manuscript revision. But luckily, we got it done, thanks to the active co-authors (!) and here you can read about our latest achievements. Its about anti-viral drug ganciclovir and how its use together with another chemotherapeutic drug, methotrexate, can improve cytotoxic effects in cancer cells, since ganciclovir inhibits a specific efflux proteins and thus methotrexate from transporting out of the cancer cells. 

Read the paper from this link (open access)

We have a lot coming on in the next months also. Firstly, we are organizing an online conference, under the NordicPOP University Hub called "Prodrug technology and Continuous processing workshops & Meeting with FinPharmaNet for graduate students" on 26-27th of August, 2021. There is still time to register for the event, so please have a look on the schedule and see the great speakers who we are hosting, at least for the prodrug part:

Click here for the schedule 

So, see you online soon!

July and the Summer Holiday

Like I have posted before, July is the holiday month in Finland. It has been a relatively hot summer so far here, so nice that everybody can have also time to relax and enjoy the summer despite the holiday month they have decided to have! And most importantly have time to do other things than science, since I think that it makes you more motivated, more creative and more productive, if your brain gets something else to think about and have time to be happy every once in a while! 😀

Of course, we still need to be careful with COVID-19 and play it safe! But despite that have a nice summer to everyone and see you in August!