News

May 2022: Interview with KJJ at 29:55 in the Podcast Tankelyn (in Danish)

Listen here: "TANKELYN podcast: Lægemidler"

Mar 2021: Glucose responsive insulin hits the Daily Mail!

Click to read the feature: Why 2020 was the year of marvellous medicine

Mar 2021: New paper on insulin fractal self-assembly in Nanoscale!

Big congratulations to Narendra who is the first author on this paper which resulted from a large collaborative effort and reports the fractal assembly of terpyridine-modified human insulin:

Controlling the fractal dimension in self-assembly of terpyridine modified insulin by Fe2+ and Eu3+ to direct in vivo effects

terpyinsulin


Feb 2021: Preparative HPLC: we are coming after you!

Our paper on high performance flash chromatography (HPFC) of peptides and insulin conjugates has just been published online by ChemBioChem:

High-performance reversed-phase flash chromatography purification of peptides and chemically modified insulins

Here we describe how HPFC, which uses low/medium pressure instruments and disposable reverse-phase columns, can be used to purify peptides. It takes the stress out of purifying peptides that are poorly soluble, are very hydrophobic or that you just need in larger (lab scale) amounts. We used Biotage Isolera and Selekt instruments, as well as the latest generation of columns from Biotage.

Congratulations to Kasper K Sørensen, Maciej Paprocki and Narendra Kumar Mishra for this achievement! This is the result of a close collaboration with our colleague at Biotage AB, Dr Amit Mehrotra. Thank you, Amit, for making this possible!

Dec 2020: New interview with KJJ on Danish public service radio P1 about Glucose Responsive Insulin. Listen here!

Nov 2020: Our paper on an unprecedented glucose responsive insulin has just been published in Chem. Eur. J.:

An Aldehyde Responsive, Cleavable Linker for Glucose Responsive Insulins

An estimated 463 million people currently live with diabetes of which approximately 10% have type 1 diabetes (T1D). Current commercial insulin variants have given T1D patients the possibility to regulate their blood glucose. However, T1D patients have to measure their blood glucose concentration and then self-administer short- and long-acting insulins according to their needs. Even with optimal insulin treatment, tight control of blood glucose is difficult.

For decades, the development of a glucose responsive insulin (GRI) has remained an elusive goal. Here we report our unprecedented concept for a glucose responsive insulin. The key innovation is a glucose cleavable linker. With increasing glucose concentrations, the active form of our GRI is released. We report the chemical synthesis and characterization of these linkers and show how they are built into glucose responsive insulins.

This is the first step in what we hope will be a rewarding journey towards new insulin variants.

Congratulations to Karin Mannerstedt, Narendra K Mishra, Ebbe Engholm, Morten Lundh and Philip J. Pedersen, as well as their colleagues at both Gubra Aps (www.gubra.dk) and Red Glead Discovery (www.redglead.com)!

A big Thank You to: Niels Vrang of Gubra Aps (Denmark), who co-supervised and sponsored the project Björn Borgström and Thomas Brimertat Red Glead Discovery (Sweden) Sanjoy Dutta and Jonathan Rosenat the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (New York) for funding, who made this possible!

Aug 2020: We are very pleased that our recent studies on ligand-recognizing motifs in plant LysM receptors have been published in Science:

Ligand-recognizing motifs in plant LysM receptors are major determinants of specificity

SCIENCE
Congratulations to our collaborators in plant biology at Aarhus University, Zoltan Bozsoki, Kira Gysel, Simona Radutoiu, Kasper R. Andersen and Jens Stougaard, as well as our international collaborators.

Here we report on the glycobiology of the interaction between rhizobacteria and legumes that leads to nitrogen-fixing in legumes. This process converts nitrogen to ammonia and is of immense importance for plant growth at a planetary scale. In this work, we identified the binding pockets that differentiate recognition of immunogenic and symbiotic chitin-derived glycans by plant LysM receptors.
From our side, Mikkel B. Thygesen, Ebbe Engholm, and Christian Kofoed contributed the chemical synthesis and biophysics. We isolated complex lipochitin oligosaccharides, converted them into functional glycoconjugates without the need for protecting groups, and then did binding studies.

This work builds on chemoselective carbohydrate chemistry for the construction of glycoconjugates:
Nature Protocols 2017
ChemBioChem 2017

Previous publications with our friends at AU include:
Nature 2015
PNAS 2012
eLife 2018

Congratulations to Ebbe, Christian, and Mikkel, and a big Thank You to everybody involved in this study!

Jul 2020: Naya is the first author on our first paper with our colleagues from UBC - congratulations Naya!

Bioimaging and Biodistribution of the Metal Ion Controlled Self-Assembly of PYY3-36 Studied by SPECT/CT CHEMBIOCHEM
Nov 2019: Interview with KJJ at the TIDES Europe conference is online!



Nov 4, 2019: Naya Kalomoiri (KJJ group) and Mette Malle (Hatzakis lab) win the poster award at the Copenhagen Nanomedicine day - Congratulations!

Naya and Mette wins Poster Award at Cph Nanomedicine Dayt
Oct 2019: KJJ is an invited speaker at the TIDES Europe conference (Link to Conference homepage)

Sep 2019: We welcome Dimitrios Noutsias to the group. His position is financed by a 3-year Alfred Benzon Investigator Grant.

Sep 2019: Tuule and Oliwia successfully defended their MSc theses.

Jul 2019: KJJ receives the Alfred Benzon Investigator Fellowship from the Benzon Foundation.


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