This coming Monday, May 15th, we’ll be going to the Triangle Soft Matter conference at UNC Chapel Hill. Hannah Reese, Camden Cutright, and Radina Lilova will be presenting a poster that represents a collection of our work on soft materials. Dr. Menegatti will also be in attendance. Come check it out and chat with us – interesting collaborations are always sought!

Ashton Lavoie recently presented her work on a straight-through downstream processing technology that she is developing in our lab. The talk was given in the Bioprocessing of the Future symposium to industrial, academic, and regulatory audience. She talked about the removal of host cell proteins from aqueous streams and how her proteomic analysis work is getting us closer to a ligand or series of ligands that could specifically remove impurities from a process stream.

To find out more about the BPD program, feel free to visit the NCBiotech page.

A new paper on the selection and design of a peptide ligand for the separation of human erythropoietin has been published in the Journal of Chromatography A.  The publication focuses on work primarily performed by William Kish during his time in the lab as a doctoral student.

The work tells about the search for cyclic ligands that bind erythropoietin with higher specificity, and includes information about how the authors had to combat the peptide library’s propensity to produce sequences that were primarily hydrophobic in nature. The use of in-silico docking informed the study, a tool the lab is currently using and developing to make our processes and searches better tuned and better understood.

The paper is currently available online – check it out!

Citation and link: William S Kish, Hiroyuki Sachi, Amith D Naik, Matthew K Roach, Benjamin G Bobay, Robert K Blackburn, Stefano Menegatti, Ruben G Carbonell. Design, selection, and development of cyclic peptide ligands for human erythropoietin. J. Chrom. A. 2017.

Keywords: Erythropoietin; Cyclic peptide ligands; Ligand screening; Affinity chromatography; Affinity maturation; In-silico docking

Journal of Chromatography A image came from the J. Chrom. A description on Elsevier.

Hannah Reese went to the 253rd American Chemical Society meeting in San Fransisco.  She presented some of her work in the lab on the separation of IgG isoforms to the BIOT division of the meeting.  She would like to thank our collaborator, Allen Hirsh from Cryobiophysica, for providing the piSEP buffer and gradient maker system.  Way to go, Hannah!

(ACS logo: https://assets.acs.org/v2.0/acs-bootstrap/images/acs-logo.svg)

Alum of the group, Alex Kearny, has earned a Fulbright fellowship.  This award is one of the highest international study awards given by the U.S. Government, and will help enhance his studies immensely.

Congrats Alex!

Ashton Lavoie has recently passed her preliminary exam!  This means that she has been found a suitable candidate to complete her PhD.  At the same time, she completed the requirements for her master’s degree in Chemical Engineering here at NCState.

Those of us who are younger are very excited – Ashton is the first student of Dr. Menegatti’s to do the exam.  Looking up to you, Ashton!

Congratulations to Camden Cutright and Kaitlyn Bacon on their receipt of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious graduate fellowship award!

The award is for promising scientists at the graduate level and focuses on both quality of research as well as broader impacts within society.  In addition to the grant itself, the fellowship comes with fantastic opportunities for networking, travel, and (of course) gives the student more input and abilities within their research.

They were chosen from an extremely competitive field against other American graduate students based off of a research proposal and personal statement, among their excellent performances in both undergraduate and graduate level courses.

Dr. Menegatti has won the prestigious NSF CAREER award for young faculty based off of his 2016 proposal.  This award is meant to recognize and stimulate research and teaching faculty with promising career tracks and creative, productive ideas.  It also encourages young faculty to be good role models and take up leadership roles within their departments and research fields.

The Biopep group is excited to see what the future holds for Dr. Menegatti, and what research tracks we’ll go down next.

Congratulations, Dr. Menegatti!

William Kish won the graduate student poster competition at the ISPE CaSa Life Sciences Technology Conference on March 30, 2016 in Raleigh, NC. For winning, William was awarded an all expenses paid trip to Atlanta, GA to present his poster at the 2016 ISPE Annual Meeting & Expo (9/18/2016 – 9/21/2016). William’s poster was entitled “Cyclic Peptide Ligands for the Purification of Erythropoietin by Affinity Chromatography” and the abstract can be found here: http://www.ispe.org/students/poster-competition-abstract.

Dr. Menegatti presented an invited lecture at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy in Chapel Hill. The lecture is part of the Series in Molecular Pharmaceutics.

Eschelman Guest Lecture