General Research Interest
Structure-based drug design, Computational drug design and discovery, Molecular recognition, Computational chemistry, X-ray protein crystallography.Research Description
My research focus is drug-target interaction at the molecular level. I combine computational molecular design with X-ray crystallography to do structure-based drug design and discovery. Currently, my cancer related projects are: 1) IL-6/JAK2/STAT3 signaling pathway. The design focus is to target the STAT3 SH2 domain to prevent STAT3 phosphorylation and dimerization; and to disrupt IL-6/IL-6R/gp130 functional complex. 2) DNMT1 and PRMT5. The design focus is to inhibit DNMT1 and PRMT5 catalytic sites from DNA and histone epigenetic methylationsTransinstitutional Work
Current trans-institutional work include: 1) collaborations with Drs. Tushar Patel, Greg Lesinski and Don Benson at College of Medicine, and Dr. Jiayuh Lin at the Nationwide Children’s hospital Columbus on anti-cancer drug discovery targeting IL-6/STAT3 oncogenic pathway; 2) collaboration with Dr. Rob Baiocchi at College of Medicine on anti-cancer drug discovery targeting PRMT5 epigenetic enzyme; 3) collaboration with Dr. Xiaodong Wang at the University of Toledo on drug design targeting CFTR to fight cystic fibrosis.