Efforts include:
- High-throughput screening-based “chemical probe development”, seeking first-in-class small molecules for investigating the therapeutic potential of new target proteins.
- Probe development efforts encompass multiple therapeutic areas, including treatments for cancers, glaucoma, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), addiction, infectious diseases, and mood disorders.
Other exploratory efforts use medicinal chemistry in concert with high-throughput screening or following HTS campaigns, where we seek to discover and optimize “chemical probes“, or first-in-class small molecules that should prove useful for investigating the therapeutic potential of new target proteins. Such probe development efforts encompass multiple therapeutic areas, including treatments for ALS, Parkinson’s Disease, addiction, infectious diseases, cancers, glaucoma, and mood disorders.
One such chemical probe effort, a collaboration with Patsy McDonald, targets the orphan GPCR GPR151, a target that may be relevant for the development of treatments for addiction, depression, and schizophrenia. In a collaboration with Sathya Puthanveettil we are investigating the potential of facilitating the function of kinesin motor proteins as a novel approach to therapies for Alzheimer’s disease(AD) and frontal temporal dementia (FTD), which are poorly-treated, common, and devastating disorders that increasingly burden world health care systems. In a collaboration with Corinne Lasmezas, we are developing compounds that rescue neurons from toxicity of protein aggregates, relevant for developing new therapies for ALS and Parkinson’s Disease.
