Masterclass – From concept to innovation: chemical biology in medical translation

Our member Pivot Park has invited Jan van Hest, Maarten Merkx and Luc Brunsveld from TU Eindhoven to give a lecture about chemical biology in medical translation.

This lecture will be a hybrid meeting and hosted at Pivot Park. Please note only limited seats will be available at Pivot Park and we are organising this event according to the current Covid-19 measurements. First comes first served.

In this masterclass we will cover the following topics:

• Nanomedicine – Jan van Hest (onsite and online)
  Nanomedicine is regarded as a potentially ground breaking technology to improve therapeutic efficacy. In order to ensure the technology can live up to its expectations particle features in a biological context should be well controlled. Furthermore, the chain of knowledge should be involved, to ensure that relevant clinical questions can be translated into commercially applicable nanoformulations. This lecture will describe a selection of the approaches followed at TU/e with regard to nanomedicine development.

• Engineering biomolecular sensors for point-of-care diagnostics and continuous monitoring – Maarten Merkx (onsite and online)
  Immunoassays form the cornerstone of today`s clinical biomolecular diagnosis. However, their translation into point-of-care assays and continuous monitoring applications has proven challenging, because traditional heterogeneous immunoassays require multiple incubation and washing steps, the addition of exogenous reagents, and external calibration. In my lecture I’ll present some of the new diagnostic platform technologies currently being developed within ICMS that address these needs using advanced biomolecular engineering and novel (single molecule) optical detection technology. Among others I’ll discuss the development of bioluminescent sensor proteins that allow homogenous immunoassays to be performed directly in blood plasma and present the integration of these bioluminescent sensor proteins with paper- and thread-based diagnostic devices for point-of-care diagnostic applications.

• Stabilization of Protein-Protein Interactions; from chemical biology concept to drug discovery – Luc Brunsveld (onsite and online)
  Our group combines organic synthesis, protein chemistry, structural biology, and supramolecular chemistry to perform chemical biology studies on protein-protein interactions (PPIs) with the aim to enable innovative medicinal chemistry for ‘molecular glues’ for PPIs. In this presentation, I aim to show that a chemical biology approach to protein-protein interactions (PPIs) helps to unravel the underlying, more complex, interaction mechanisms. This conceptual approach to PPIs allows to recognize and apply concepts such as multivalency and cooperativity within the context of drug discovery. Using nuclear receptors and 14-3-3 proteins as examples this presentation aims to provide insights into questions such as 1) How can chemical biology studies steer medicinal chemistry for PPIs? 2) What are the key biophysical characteristics of molecules that stabilize PPIs? 3) How can we find a chemical starting point for PPI stabilization?

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