1st Scientific Retreat
On October 27th – 28th, the scientists met for the first scientific retreat. Progress of the activities from the last year were reported and further activities planned for the next period.
New PhD students started in the Hellinger lab.
Paula Schwarz started in November 2021 her PhD thesis. Paula will work on the discovery, design and application of peptide BBB shuttles for immunosuppressive therapy. The team sends warm wishes to her and we look forward to fruitful science.
ZK-81B project coordinator presents latest research on the Peptide Therapeutics Symposium
Roland Hellinger (coordinator of the ZK-81B) will present a virtual poster presentation reporting a recently published research study on the structure-activity relationship of the drug candidate T20K at the 16th Annual Peptide Therapeutics Symposium during October, 21st-22nd, 2021.
New research study on the role of the cyclic cystine-knot motif in cyclotides published
Under the contribution of the ZK-81B project PeptAIDes, a study was recently published by the ACS Chemical Biology Journal (Impact Factor 5, Q1 in Biochemistry & Mol. Medicine). The structure-function-relationship of the unique cyclic cystine-rich knot (CCK) motif in cyclotides was evaluated . The anti-proliferative bioactivity on activated immune cells of T20K is strongly dependent on the native CCK motif and cystine-knot or acyclic variants lost antiproliferative activity. The structural motif was identified as detrimental for cell penetration into mammalian cells, since only the native peptide but no truncated variants showed transport across biological membranes. Structural studies have further underlined the importance of the CCK for structure and function of anti-proliferative T20K – a drug candidate in clinical phase studies for the therapy of Multiple Sclerosis.
The study was carried out at the Institute of Pharmacology (Medical University of Vienna) and by the contribution of collaboration partner from the University of Basel, the University of Freiburg and the University of Queensland.
Hellinger, R., Muratspahić, E., Devi, S., Koehbach, J., Vasileva, M., Harvey, PJ., Craik, DJ., Gründemann, C., and Gruber, CW. Importance of the cyclic cystine knot structural motif for immunosuppressive effects of cyclotides, 2021, ACS Chem Bio, in press, doi: 10.1021/acschembio.1c00524.
