Dr. May Khanna Elected Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual property, educate and mentor innovative students, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society. NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists and administrators from NAI Member Institutions who have demonstrated remarkable innovation producing technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society. They also have growing success in patents, licensing and commercialization.

May is the founder of Regenerix, LLC, where she is moving forward compounds for therapeutics to treat neurodegenerative diseases. She is also the co-founder of Cliacept, Inc., a predominantly minority women-owned company, founded by the first cohort of students from her innovative course, Designing Drugs: From Chemistry to Cure.

Congratulations May!

Chemical Mimicry of PCH1B

We have a new paper under review! Our laboratory developed a novel cell line to model Pontocerebellar Hypoplasia type 1B (PCH1B) from stem cells obtained from a patient’s blood (and heterozygous normal parents). In this paper, we show that chemical induction of disease by ERD03 (previously published in ACS Chemical Biology) recapitulates many of the hubs and nodes found in the proteomic data from the patient with the disease.

Check out the preprint at iScience

Royal Society of Chemistry Book Chapter

Congratulations to Liberty, Victor, Michael, and May on their contribution to the new book The Discovery and Utility of Chemical Probes in Target Discovery! Their article Chapter 9: Chemical Probes to Control RNA Function focuses on the development of RNA-targeting molecules to treat a wide range of human diseases. RNA-specific probes take advantage of pseudoknot, triple helix, and stem-loop structures adopted by both coding and non-coding RNA molecules.