On Tuesday March 1st, the College of Pharmacy and the master in drug discovery and development seminar series had Dr. Ahmed Fouda as the speaker for the joint event. Dr. Fouda is Adjunct assistant professor, South University, USA, MTM pharmacist, Aspen RX, USA, and a Pharmacy leader, Riteaid Co, USA. Dr. Ahmed Fouda is an entrepreneur, clinical pharmacist scientist with diverse experiences in chemical biology and clinical pharmacy. Dr. Fouda worked as a research scientist for The Scripps Research Institute, a world elite research institute, on developing novel therapeutic approaches targeting RNA in several diseases, such as Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis.
The seminar talk is titled “Optimizing chemical biology tools to decipher cell signaling pathways for better therapeutics” where he gave insights on different research projects he worked on in chemical biology and an interracial research area between chemistry and cell biology. Dr. Fouda shed lights on how using chemical probes could help identify novel targets for further therapeutic applications in various diseases. In addition, Dr. Fouda explained the development and possible applications of several ATP analogs (such as K-CLIP) as useful chemical probes in the area of chemical biology in identifying kinase substrates (such as substrates to AKT) and how such strategies are helping in the identification of kinase substrate implicated in different diseases such as cancer and how those chemical probes would help in the development of new anti cancer agents targeting those newly identified targets.
Dr. Fouda also showed how it was challenging to develop cell permeable ATP analogs and explained the techniques they utilized to enhance cellular uptake of those analogs leading to further enhancement of cellular uptake and utilization those chemical probes for more realistic in-cellulo identification of kinase substrates.