We are getting a researcher from Ukraine!

During these difficult times in Europe, one may find him/herself thinking how can we help the people who are suffering the most at the moment. Donating money and goods for the charity is of course an easy way and gives you extremely good feeling, when you know that there are professionals who can deliver food and medicines to the places where their are needed to the most. But thinking already the next phase, the reconstruction when the peace has been reached, is there something that we can already support in advance. Luckily, Academy of Finland decided to open a new call that Finnish researchers can apply to invite Ukrainian researchers to continue their work here at Finland. I immediately knew that this is something I definitely want to do, since some day those researchers are needed for the reconstruction phase, to bring everything back, also science. All I needed was a candidate and a good plan and for this one, a good collaborator. And then everything turned up-side-down, I wasn't even the applicant, but my dear fellow Prof. Jaana Rysä from the Toxicology discipline from our School of Pharmacy was the main applicant, and I was the collaborator, and we did it, wrote a great application for an applicant who contacted us and Jaana received the funding! So we can host one researcher from Ukraine as soon as the formalities are handled. Well done Jaana and congratulations for both of you! 😀

 

 

More information from this link.

Time for a summer break!

After a very productive spring semester and a hard work that the whole team has done, its soon time to have a summer holiday break! Especially, since the wheather is exceptionally warm and sunny now! Before the relaxation, we usually try to clear up the tables, meaning going through also fridges and freezers from the samples that have been stored just in case. So our technician Tiina, did some great work today, and calculated that approximately 2000 HPLC vials was discharged. Well not totally discharged, as we want to be as greenish as possible, we re-cycle vials (wash them), and only the inserts (small glass tubes inside the vials) and caps are disposed. Anyway, that also means that she has produced at least 2000 new data points during the past months for the rest of us to be analyzed! 😅 For me, the clean-up has meant more of finalizing project reports etc., but also time to re-think how to continue from here. There will be many new things happening during the next 6 months, so I can't wait to see them to be realized.

But before that, have a great summer and let's get back with fresh energy in August!

This spring's greatest endeavor

Although there have been many review paper's that we have published recently, there was one that I started to plan already during the COVID-19 outbreak. But for some reason, I never had time to start writing, although my co-authors did some great background work during the spring 2020. Then, in the beginning of this year, I was invited by Prof. Pardridge to write about this topic in my mind, to a special issue called "Advanced Blood-Brain Barrier Drug Delivery" in Pharmaceutics journal along with other great scientist, so I couldn't say no. 😀 So I had to put it all together to achieve the following paper that has been now published. 

Link to the special issue

I must admit that the result was something else that I had originally in my mind, but it, once again, opened my eyes how much work there still is to improve the brain drug delivery, and how less we really understand about the complexity behind it. But anyway, greatest thank-you goes to the co-authors; Santosh for the great figures, Magdalena for the compiling the tables, and Johanna for the original literature research. This really was one of my greatest personal achievement during the past 6 months.

Link to our review (open access)