Suzanne O'Connor Email and Phone Number

Developing PROTACs with the Ciulli group in collaboration with Boehringer Ingleheim

Experience in late stage drug discovery: Compound synthesis in sufficient quantity and purity for in vivo studies. Design and prioritisation of compounds for synthesis; optimising potency, metabolic stability, solubility and permeability. Design and development of efficient synthetic routes for late stage diversification

3 eight month rotations in Oncology iMED (Innovative Medicines and Early Development)Oncology Medicinal Chemistry : Design and synthesis of new compounds, analysis in terms of potency, selectivity over off-targets and pharmacokinetic profile and the subsequent design of new compounds for synthesis. Experience in structure based drug design and matched pair analysis to identify trends in properties such as potency and metabolism. Computational Chemistry : developed skills such as docking, conformational analysis to prioritize compounds for synthesis, homology modelling, analysis of crystal structures and virtual screening. Identification of weak bonds with bond dissociation energy calculations to predict susceptibility to autooxidation and database analysis to determine transformations that have historically improved drug properties that could be used in a current oncology project. Drug Safety Metabolism : Experiments to measure compound metabolism to identify the enzymes involved and metabolites formed - important for early identification of potential drug-drug interactions. Experience with recombinant enzymes and microsomes and extensive use of mass spectrometry.

Four month research project developing ruthenium based gold nanoparticles to investigate their DNA binding abilities supervised by Prof. Thorrfinnur Gunnlaugsson.