research
Our research group has broad interests in the areas of bioorganic chemistry and chemical biology. The lab has been located in a new pharmacy in Hanyang University ERICA campus since 2011. With the equipments such as 500MHz NMR, LC-MS, MPLC, microwave reactor, microplate reader, cell culture facility, gel running equipment, we are currently studying the following intertwined topics.
1. Bioorganic Chemistry of Oxidative stress and Antioxidant
Oxidative stress is implicated in many pathologies such as cancer, metabolic diseases and neurodegeneration. We are trying to understand the chemical and molecular basis underlying the differences between specific types of oxidative stress. We are also trying to prepare novel antioxidants which can counteract an oxidative stress in a specific way. For example, we are investigating antioxidants as chemical means to directly or indirectly perturb the oxidative stress caused by lipid peroxidation or redox chemistry of various metalloproteins. We are also investigating chemicals which induce antioxidant response element (ARE) to enhance the expression of endogenous antioxidant molecules.
2. Organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry
Organic synthesis plays a crucial role in medicinal chemistry, biochemisty, and bioorganic chemistry. Therefore, development of a synthetic methodology can be a key breakthrough to address a various questions in those fields. We are especially interested in developing synthetic methods for novel chemical scaffolds with interesting biological activities which otherwise are hard to prepare. We are also interested in medicinal chemistry through which hit compounds identified from our screening projects ared optimized for better activities and drug-likeness.
3. Drug Screening and Chemical Biology
Our lab is interested in screening projects to identify novel hit comounds. We are screening chemical and natural product libraries to find the active compounds. We are going to elucidate their mechanism of actions and molecular targets by using various biochemical and cell biology techniques such as western blotting, PCR and immunocytochemistry. We are also interested in developing novel biorthogonal reactions which can be useful in pull-down experiment by which molecular target of the biologically active compounds ared elucidated. Currently we are running a high content imaging assay (neurite outgrowth) to identify active compounds for neurodegenerative disease, a reporter assay (protein misfolding) for metabolic diseases, and whole cell antiproliferation assay for an infectious disease, malaria.