▶︎ CANCELED: Organic Chemistry Seminar
Gonçalo Bernardes After completing his D.Phil. in 2008 at the University of Oxford, U.K., he undertook postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, and the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and worked as a Group Leader at Alfama Lda in Portugal. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer (Tenured) and recently has been promoted to Reader (Associate Professor). Gonçalo is the recipient of two European Research Council grants; a starting grant and a proof-of-concept grant, and was awarded the Harrison–Meldola Memorial Prize in 2016 and the MedChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship in 2018, both from the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fight cancer.
Our research uses chemistry principles to address questions of importance in life sciences and molecular medicine. This lecture will cover recent examples of emerging areas in our group in:
(i) methods developed for site-selective chemical modification of proteins at cysteine, disulfide and lysine and their use to build stable and functional protein conjugates for in vivo applications
(ii) bioorthogonal cleavage reactions for targeted drug activation in cells
(iii) by identifying on- and off-targets for anti-cancer entities using our own machine intelligence platform, unveiling the underlying molecular mechanisms of target recognition and linking drug target binding to modulation of disease, we explore the use of natural products as selective cancer modulators