Skip to content

Peptides

Attending the RICT2024 in Bordeaux

Akane Kawamura, Siddique Amin and Filomena Saulino attended the RICT2024 (the 58th International Conference on Medicinal Chemistry) held in Bordeaux this July – a conference focused on the intersection of chemical biology and drug discovery.  Akane Kawamura gave a talk on cyclic peptides as chemical tools to probe biology, and our PhD Students presented their posters relating to work on cyclic peptides (Siddique), and inhibitor development against epigenetic reader domains (Filomena).   The event was a fantastic experience, with plenty of discussions with other medicinal chemists and chemical biologists from around the globe.  

Down Under at the International Peptide Symposium

Prof Akane Kawamura travelled down under in October 2023 to talk about peptide probes for studying epigenetic proteins at the 13th International Peptide Symposium in Brisbane Australia.   A special thanks to the organisers for this great opportunity to meet with peptide and protein chemists, old friends and collaborators, and many new faces.   

Emma Wins RSC CBBG Travel Grant

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

RSC Chemical Biology Symposium

Kawamura group PhD student Grace Roper attended the RSC Chemical Biology Symposium which took place in London on 9th May 2022.  Grace presented her work in collaboration with GSK with a poster on ‘macrocyclic peptides as affinity probes’.  Some brilliant talks and opportunities for networking,  Grace really enjoyed catching up with colleagues from the Oxford-GSK-Crick CDT.  

Collaboration with NovoNordisk

Delighted to share the first publication of our collaboration with Martin Munzel and colleagues at NovoNordisk ‘An integrated platform approach enables discovery of potent, selective and ligand-competitive cyclic peptides targeting the GIP receptor‘. Thanks to all involved: Bhaskar Bhushan, Daniele Granata, Christian S. Kaas, Marina A. Kasimova, Qiansheng Ren, Christian N. Cramer,  Mark D. White, Ann Maria K. Hansen,Christian Fledelius, Gaetano Invernizzi,Kristine Deibler, Oliver D. Coleman, Xin Zhao, Xinping Qu, Haimo Liu, Silvana S. Zurmühl,b Janos T. Kodra, Akane Kawamura and Martin Münzel The work was supported by a NovoNordisk STAR postdoc fellowship and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. Read… Read More »Collaboration with NovoNordisk

Novo Nordisk Collaborator Visit

This week the Kawamura group was thrilled to host Dr Martin Münzel, scientific director in research chemistry at Novo Nordisk. Martin is a long-time collaborator with the group and gave a fascinating talk on the use of mRNA display in drug discovery workflows as well as engaging in some stimulating conversations about peptide chemistry. Martin is also a MosMed CDT industrial supervisor to group member Tom Smith. We’d love to have you back anytime, Martin!  

Paper in JBC

  • by

Paper in JBC – Engineered anti-inflammatory peptides inspired by mapping an evasin-chemokine interaction. Our latest paper on the development of anti-inflammatory peptides inspired by tick evasins is out now in Journal of Biological Chemistry.  Multi-disciplinary collaborative work with Prof. Shoumo Bhattacharya & Prof. Carol Robinson Groups, with Benoit Darlot & James Eaton from the group leading the study. This work was funded by the BHF, Oxford BHF Centre for Research Excellence and SBM.