Charles Loh
Forschungsgruppenleiter, Chemische Biologie
Bioaktivität im Fokus kreativer organischer Synthese
Vita
In all, we seek to address longstanding challenges in the glycosciences by the following key approaches:
a) Biomimetic Synthesis. By developing new catalytic glycosylation methodologies, through mimicking how glycosyl transferases exploits noncovalent interactions in nature, we strive to access complex small molecule synthetic glycosides bearing subtle stereochemical differences with precision. The chemistry programme is highly mechanistically driven, and intensive investigation into reaction kinetics allow fundamental understanding how intricacies in glycosylation mechanisms affect effectiveness and selectivity in glycosidic bond construction.
Our vision is to use frontier chemistry to open up access unexplored sp3-rich glycosidic chemical space.
b) Phenotypic Screening. Capitalizing on a forward chemical genetics approach, we exploit phenotypic screening to unravel hitherto unknown biological activity in synthetic glycosides, particularly those related to oncologically relevant signaling pathways.