Christina Schroeder, Senior Fellow in the Peptide Threpeutics division of Genentech, will deliver a seminar entitled, "Bioactive peptides: harnessing nature for the benefit of humankind." Hosted by Bobby Arora.
For more information about Christina Schroeder, click here.
Abstract: Disulfide constrained bioactive peptides of venomous creatures, marine or plant origin have been instrumental in guiding our understanding of ion channel and receptor pharmacology and physiology and enzymatic modulation. The highly complex disulfide framework renders them stable against thermal, pH and proteolytic assault, and their relatively small size, typically 15–40 amino acids, make them amenable synthetic production and rapid structure-activity relationship studies. These attractive features in combination with low immunogenicity and high target specificity have led to this class of peptides being pursued as therapeutic leads for a range of diseases including pain, stroke, and cancer, with a few peptides reaching clinical approval. In this talk, I will describe our efforts into the use of traditional assay-guided lead discovery to identify novel modulators of ion channels and enzymes, our peptide engineering efforts to design homo- and hetero-bivalent modulators to elucidate ion channel pharmacology and physiology, and fluorescent labeling of disulfide constrained peptides for the development of surgical probes with a focus of pain and cancer.