Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease impacting the nervous system and resulting in a wide range of symptoms including characteristic motor impairments such as tremor, slowed movement and muscle rigidity. It is an age-related disease affecting 1% of the population over the age of 60. Although symptomatic treatments are available, there are no […]

This proposed project is to develop efficient sensing materials and devices that can detect trace amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS), in particular a type of activated oxygen, namely singlet oxygen. Detection of singlet oxygen is an important but very challenging task in biological and pharmaceutical applications. The main difficulty in detecting singlet oxygen is […]

Conventional molecular discovery relies on high-throughput screening strategies (HTS) to identify molecules that match a specific set of user-defined properties. Unfortunately, due to the enormous size of chemical spaces (10^60 molecules in the case of the drug-like chemical space), HTS is usually performed over pre-built chemical libraries of moderate size, often by employing computational/AI methods […]

Our project list is the field of organic chemistry, where the synthesis of small molecules, having potential biological activities, is a paramount objective. Also, the essence of the project lies in new effective green iron catalysts for enantioselective reactions, which is one of the most important tasks of modern organic chemistry to save the environment. […]

The results obtained in this project will lead to new tools for the preparation of molecules of interest, possibly with biological activities. These studies will contribute to the development of new green synthetic methods using environmentally friendly catalysts. Efficient and practical synthetic methods are in high demand in the industrial and academic sectors. In particular, […]

Tissue transglutaminase (TG2) is a protein that is able to mediate the cross-linking of other proteins. The unregulated activity of TG2 is implicated in fibrosis, celiac disease as well as cancer cell survival. Blocking this activity has been shown to decrease tumour size and growth in mice. We have previously designed small molecules that are […]

Glycoconjugate vaccines have shown efficiency to control infectious diseases and hold great promises in cancer immunotherapy. Nonetheless, there is an important need to identify novel immunostimulating carriers for carbohydrate antigens as well as to optimize the currently used protein carriers. This Mitacs project aims at developing versatile biochemical approaches and technology for the design and […]

Diagnostic tests that currently direct patient therapy in cancer and other diseases are more typically performed at the genetic level, despite the fact that the beneficial response to drugs and the development of resistance are rooted in the proteins that comprise the cell’s signaling pathways. We argue that this is a major gap, as proteomics […]

The interns will be working in medicinal chemistry on two projects: the design and synthesis of drugs targeting the cyclin dependent kinase, CDK1; and the design of small molecule inhibitors of mutant KRAS. Both of these proteins are commonly involved in cancer initiation. In neither case are there good drugs available to patients. Although separate […]

My project aims to discover a treatment for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a disease that affects one billion people in the world. OSA is a serious chronic disorder that happens when a person’s breathing is intermittently interrupted during sleep. This is caused by an obstruction in the airways when muscles in the back of the […]

Our goal is to employ a host of new compounds, made by the applicant in her lab in Brazil, for drug discovery studies at the University of Toronto. Specifically, the host uses a technique called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to obtain signatures of drugs or ligands. These signatures can identify those compounds which bind strongly […]

The heart is a complex organ that pumps the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool of blood to the body each day. To accomplish this incredible feet, millions of cells must work together in a coordinated manner, enabled by tight connections between their electrical and mechanical activity. In cardiac diseases these connections are disturbed, which […]