Biological evaluation of modified COX inhibitors at Vanderbilt University

/ July 1, 2014/ News

by Wilma Neumann (doctoral student at Leipzig University): After a successful start-up of a new collaboration project last autumn followed by a joint publication earlier this year, the group of Prof. Larry Marnett again welcomed me in their lab during my second research stay at Vanderbilt between May 21st and June 21st, 2014. Continuing our project on conjugates of cisplatin and COX inhibitors for use as antitumor agents, Brenda Crews, Cristina Daniel, and Kebreab Ghebreselasie actively supported me with the biological evaluation of new conjugates I had prepared in Leipzig. I am also very thankful to Cristina for introducing me to further molecular biology techniques and for her great effort performing numerous experiments within the short period of my stay. Besides cisplatin–COX inhibitor conjugates, we also continued with investigations on structure–activity relationships of carbaborane-containing COX inhibitors, our second collaboration project with the Marnett group in which we use borane clusters as pharmacophores to obtain novel COX inhibitors with improved inhibitory potency and selectivity. Further thanks go to Rosanne Delapp (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) for performing ICP-MS measurements of numerous cell samples.

Besides research, I enjoyed the hot and often quite humid weather, exploring the different districts and parks of Nashville and entering the fray at the country music festival (CMA Music Festival).

The research stay again yielded lots of results providing the basis for upcoming joint publications and enabled planning of the next steps within our collaboration projects. It also gave me further interesting insights into the Southern Culture. I gratefully acknowledge generous support from the Vanderbilt-Leipzig collaboration project and the bilateral project-related exchange program by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD-PPP-USA).

CMA-music-festival Cumberland-River view-of-Nashville