After months of hard work Maddy Sayers and Maia Evans have successfully completed their MChem thesis and viva in the Kawamura Group. Their work has involved investigating different roles and uses for cyclic peptides as chemical probes working with PhD students Siddique and Emma. Congratulations and well done on all your hard work, it has been a joy to work with you! We are looking forward to seeing where you go next.
Emma won an RSC CBBG travel grant which enabled her to visit the lab of our collaborator Professor Frances Platt (Department of Pharmacology) in Oxford for two weeks in January 2023. The visit enabled Emma to test her cyclic peptide compounds in next stage assay models including against mouse brain homogenates and cell lysates. This enabled cross-screening against different isoenzymes of the disease target for selectivity studies, helping accelerate hit compound progression for lysosomal disorders and neurodegenerative therapy. As well as advancing the PhD, the visit helped strengthen collaborations with a world-leading laboratory in the disease field, with future collaborative work already in place in the coming months. Image Description(… Read More »Emma Wins RSC CBBG Travel Grant
A very warm welcome to Chris Mullins, who joins the group as a PhD student as part of the Molecular Sciences for Medicine (MoSMed) CDT. Chris comes to us from Evox Therapeutics, Oxford where he specialised in the downstream purification of exosomes for rare disease indications. He graduated from The University of Warwick with an MBio in Biochemistry with Industrial Placement, during which he spent 12-months at UCB in Slough developing novel engineered antibody formats. Welcome to the group Chris!
Earlier this week, Klem attended the RSC ChemBio conference in Ireland where he presented his DPhil work on the characterisation of TET enzyme bimodal activity, highlighting previously unappreciated poor coupling of 5-methylcytosine hydroxylase and 2-OG decarboxylase enzyme activities, which may have implications for the control of TCA cycle intermediate formation and inhibitor development.
We are excited to welcome Dr. Rob Dawber to group as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Rob received his MChem degree at the University of Leeds in 2018. In July 2022, Rob completed his PhD at the same institute through the MRC DiMeN DTP programme, where he developed peptidomimetic inhibitors of key protein-protein interactions of the Aurora A kinase under the supervision of Prof. Richard Bayliss and Prof. Andy Wilson. Rob will be investigating lysine demethylases (KDMs) in relation to the chemistry of epigenetics and associated cancers. Welcome Rob!