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
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.
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.
Many congratulations to group member Grace Roper and her husband Cameron Taylor (a medicinal chemist!) on their wedding! Thanks for inviting us to share your day. We wish these two wonderfully talented scientists all the best!
Some great talks and networking at the Royal Society of Chemistry Interest Group for Chemical Biology and Bioorganic Chemistry postgraduate meeting at York University on 4th April. Great to be back to in-person conferences! It was a great opportunity for our early career researchers to share their latest research with colleagues from across a broad range of chemical biology backgrounds.
On Tuesday 15th March we hosted a Chemical biology workshop at Newcastle University, involving academics across the faculty of medicine science and the school of natural and environment science. Ten academics delivered flash presentations on diverse areas of research (see below). A great way to get the group talking and learning about the chemical biology research going on across the university. Engineered protein polymers for high performance, multi-functional biomaterials Daniel Peters and David A Fulton Structure guided drug discovery for loss-of-function diseases Wyatt Yue (Cyclic) peptide discovery platform Akane Kawamura In vivo Non-invasive Small Animal Molecular Imaging Services Saimir Luli Mass spectrometry tools in drug discovery Matthias Trost Biocatalysts… Read More »Chemical Biology Workshop
A warm welcome to our new Mchem Students, Oliver Crosby, Valeria Cobiltean and Hannah Hamilton who joined the group in January 2022. We hope to give them a rich experience learning from the diverse and fascinating science happening in the group and getting involved in our outreach activities.
Many Congratulations to Dr Loane Serrano who successfully defending her DPhil (Oxford) thesis titled “PCAF, SIRT1 and the regulation of substrate acetylation”. Thanks to the examiners Dr Richard Hopkinson (Leicester) and Prof James McCullagh (Oxford). Loane was an EPSRC Synthesis in Biology & Medicine CDT student and was was co-supervised by Prof. Paul Brennan (Centre for Medicines Discovery, Target Discovery Institute, Oxford). Loane really enjoyed her time in the group and said that particular highlights included; the Kawamura symposiums and Christmas dinners, the Epigenetics outreach event in Oxford and getting to know Oxford and Newcastle. Loane will be missed! We wish her every success in her future career!
A warm welcome to our new PhD students who joined us on 1st October 2021. Emma Wadforth, Oliwia Rebacz, Tom Smith, and Tim Bell will be working across a number of exciting projects funded by BBSRC, EPSRC MoS Med CTD, ERC.