Closing the year 2020

The year 2020 is soon ending, and when looking back, it was a challenging year, indeed! Despite of the COVID-19 lockdown during the spring and restrictions continued during the autumn, I would still say that we did a pretty good job! Overall, 10 new publications fro this year and 4 manuscript are still under evaluation. So, well done, team! And despite the hard competition in grants and funding, we have still been able to secure the basic research and even start new projects. Few good news were also received last and this week, but as they are not yet officially released, I will post about those later.

So cheers for the team for good work that you have done, despite the difficulties that we faced! Let's have a nice and relaxing Christmas break and very happy and productive year 2021!  

New publication out

Congratulations to Ahmed, for having your first Ph.D. thesis publication published! In this publication titled "L-Type Amino Acid Transporter 1 Enables the Efficient Brain Delivery of Small-Sized Prodrug across the Blood–Brain Barrier and into Human and Mouse Brain Parenchymal Cells" we found out that it really matters what is the size of the LAT1-utilizing prodrug. Thus, we concluded that the smaller the prodrug is, the better, meaning more effectively it is transported across the blood-brain barrier as well in to the parenchymal cells. In this paper we also compared the prodrug delivery via LAT1 among mouse and human microglia and found out that there was actually pretty little difference between the species, despite the fact that LAT1 protein expression was higher in mouse microglia compared to the corresponding human cells. This great manuscript was published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience and encouraged by this study, the best prodrug candidate is now being evaluated for its efficacy to decrease the neuroinflammation. Let's hope we can finally show that the improved delivery via LAT1 into the brain parenchyma is the key factor of improving the outcome of anti-inflammatories! So waiting for your next publication, Ahmed! :) And thank you once again to all co-authors for your great work!

Here is the link for the publication

Cleaning day and pizza!

Every once in a while we need to clean up our freezer. Although many of the samples we collect are extremely valuable, but so is their storage, since all the biological material should be stored at -80 C degrees. And opening the freezers regularly creates also a lot of ice and snow. At the end, there is so much ice and snow that it is hard to even close the doors! So today, we had the cleaning day, and we melted one deep freezer. A lot of samples that we thought we didn't need anymore were also discharged and the ones we decided to keep, were organized more effectively. These days are tough, but in the end, we were pretty happy about the created new space for new future samples! And to keep everyone happy, we also decided to order some pizza! :)

So well done team, and thank you for your effort!