Prof Ehmke Pohl
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
Type-2 diabetes, also known as adult-onset diabetes is the most common form of this disease affecting between 150 and 400 million people worldwide. Although largely preventable by maintaining a normal weight and regular exercise, case numbers are expected to rise due to modern lifestyles and working practices. Hence, improved therapies for treatment and support of the necessary life-style changes are needed. Human Glucokinase, which catalyses the phosphorylation of glucose to glucose-6-phosphate has been identified as the key control point in the liver and pancreas for glucose homeostasis as glucose-6-phosphate is the entry point for both, glycolysis and glycogen synthesis. As both pathways reduce the glucose concentration, glucose kinase activators have recently been recognised as potential means to counterbalance the glycemic imbalance associated with type-2 diabetes.
Over the last decade fragment-based methods have made a major impact on drug discovery in academia and pharmaceutical research. Recent advances in high-throughput structure determination and the development of targeted fragment libraries were instrumental, however, one of the remaining bottlenecks is the translation from multiple fragment binding sites into a credible lead compound.
Objectives
The overall goal of the proposed project is to identify new chemical entities that act as allosteric activators of human GK and present lead candidates for future drug development using a new fragment-based drug discovery approach. These efforts will be supported with the expertise from CCDC to develop new algorithms to support fragment-linking and growing approach.
Expression of isoforms of glucokinases from human liver cells and beta cells in recombinant systems has already been established. After expression and purification, these enzymes will be characterised by biophysical and biochemical techniques. Crystals for fragment-based screening will be tested synchrotron sources.
In order to develop fragment hits into ligands, hits need to be chemically linked based on the conformation and the location on the target protein. In this work package we will develop a new strategy of fragment growing based on data base searches within the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) which currently contains over 1 million 3-dimensional structures of organic and metal-organics compounds. This part of the project will be done in close collaboration with Dr. F. Stanzione from the CCDC. Any hits will inform the synthetic strategy to link fragments. Chemical synthesis of new compounds will be performed in the laboratories of our project partner, Prof. C. Cano in Newcastle.
Ligand validation – Any promising ligands will be verified in Durham by biochemical, biophysical and structural techniques in order to optimize design strategies.
Funding Notes
The award is available to UK/EU applicants only. Depending on how you meet the EPSRC’s eligibility criteria, you may be entitled to a full or a partial award.
References
Applicants should hold or expect to achieve an excellent Masters level degree in structural chemistry or biochemistry. An excellent Bachelors degree with relevant experience will also be considered.
For more information regarding MoSMed please visit the webpage: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/mosmed. Please note that MoSMed is a joint venture between Durham and Newcastle Universities.
When making an application, please select the course code F1A201 and quote the project title and reference number MoSMed20-10.