Category: Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry
Chemistry Dean Crimmins Receives ACS Guenther Award
August 31, 2009The American Chemical Society has announced that Michael T. Crimmins, senior associate dean for the natural sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the 2010 Ernest Guenther Award for outstanding achievement in the chemistry of natural products. Crimmins holds a joint appointment in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy as a professor in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products and is the Mary Ann Smith Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry. The award recognizes and encourages outstanding achievements in the analysis, structure elucidation, and chemical synthesis of natural products. In selecting the … Read more
Frye Leads UNC Team Selected for NCI Drug-Discovery Initiative
August 13, 2009A team of scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central University, and the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences will be working with the National Cancer Institute as part of a national effort to bring more targeted cancer therapies to patients as quickly as possible. The effort is led by Stephen Frye, PhD, a professor in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products and the director of the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Frye is also a member of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The … Read more
Hajjo Selected to Present at AAPS Graduate Student Symposium
July 14, 2009Rima Hajjo, a graduate student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has been selected to make a podium presentation about her research during the AAPS Annual Meeting and Exposition in Los Angeles, California. The presentation will be part of the Graduate Student Symposium in Drug Design and Discovery, which will be held on November 10 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Hajjo joined the School’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products in 2005. She is in the lab of division chair Alex Tropsha, PhD, and her research focuses on polypharmacology, network pharmacology, and computational screening of the GPCR … Read more
Live Stream: MCNP Dissertation Defense: Yizhou Dong
July 10, 2009Yizhou Dong, a graduate student in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, will defend his dissertation on Friday, July 10, from 10:00 a.m. to noon. Dong is in the lab of Kenan Professor K. H. Lee, PhD. His dissertation is titled “Design, Synthesis, and Biological Evaluation of Neo-tanshinlactone Analogues as Potent and Selective Anti-Breast Cancer Agents.” The defense will be held in Beard Hall, room 116. The defense will be streamed live on this page.
Lunch Leads to $5 Million Partnership for Lawrence
June 29, 2009After they both arrived in Chapel Hill in 2007, Nancy Allbritton, MD, PhD, asked fellow cancer researcher David Lawrence, PhD, to lunch to float the idea of a collaboration. “How could I say no? She was paying,” jokes Lawrence, a Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. That lunch created a research partnership dedicated to attacking breast and prostate cancer backed by a $5 million grant over five years from North Carolina’s University Cancer Research Fund. Lawrence moved to UNC from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Allbritton came from the University of … Read more
Bethea Receives Dissertation Completion Fellowship
April 22, 2009Heather Bethea, a graduate student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has received a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The fellowship provides a stipend of $16,000 for the 2009-2010 academic year, as well as a tuition-and-fees scholarship for three hours of doctoral dissertation credit. Bethea entered the School’s graduate program in 2005 after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry. She has been conducting research on heparan sulfate in Associate Professor Jian Liu’s lab in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products. She … Read more
Tropsha Receives UCRF Innovation Award
April 20, 2009Alex Tropsha, PhD, a professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has received an Innovation Award from the University Cancer Research Fund. The award provides $100,000 over two years to support a project aimed at developing a novel virtual screening workflow to search for novel anti-cancer agents. Tropsha, an expert in computer-assisted drug discovery and the chair of the School’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, will use information about physicochemical and geometrical features of proteins to establish new computational methodologies that will enable researchers to efficiently and accurately cull very large chemical libraries of potential anti-cancer agents … Read more
Study: Drugs Throw a Wrench into the Molecular Works of Enzymes
March 17, 2009Drugs that work by blocking the function of a protein from the outside also disrupt the protein’s internal workings, according to new research from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The discovery, made by associate professor Andrew Lee, PhD, and graduate students Randall Mauldin and Mary Carroll, is published in the March 11 issue of the journal Structure. It opens the door to the possibility of targeting proteins with drugs in new ways. The study is the first to take a comprehensive look at the changes that take place within the … Read more
Liu Receives $1.5 Million NIH Grant to Perfect Synthetic Heparin
March 2, 2009Jian Liu, PhD, an associate professor in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, has been awarded a four-year $1.48 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to further develop Recomparin, his synthetic version of the drug heparin. Liu’s project is titled “In vitro synthesis of recombinant heparan sulfate.” Heparan sulfate is a compound produced in the body that is similar to heparin but has weaker anticoagulant properties. Heparin can be made from heparin sulfate, and by modifying the molecular structure of the heparan sulfate he produces, Liu can customize the properties of heparin derived from it. Currently, … Read more
Bethea Receives Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship
December 4, 2008Heather Bethea, a graduate student at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has received an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bethea, the first student from the School to receive the fellowship, will receive a $7,350 stipend to support her study of heparan sulfate, a carbohydrate that is synthesized in mammalian cells by a series of enzymes. It is involved in many physiological functions, including regulation of cell growth and blood coagulation, and also has been found to inhibit an enzyme that enhances the onset of Alzheimer’s. Bethea’s work … Read more