On Tuesday March 8th, the master in drug discovery and development seminar series had Dr. Amr Sonousi as the speaker for the event. Dr. Sonousi’s research interest is the development of improved antibiotics for the treatment of multi-drug resistant infectious diseases. He has published five research articles in prestigious journals and had two patents. Dr. Sonousi earned his PhD from Wayne State University, Michigan, USA in 2017 while he worked with Prof. David Crich’s on the development of several aminoglycoside anti-biotics. Over 14 years of research and teaching experience locally and internationally, Dr. Sonousi received many research and teaching awards from both Cairo University and Wayne State University. Dr. Sonousi is the program leader of Pharmaceutical Science program and assistant professor at University of Hertfordshire hosted by Global Academic foundation, Cairo, Egypt.
The seminar talk he gave was titled “titled Aminoglycoside derivatives for the treatment of Multi-Drug Resistant Infectious Diseases”. In his talk, he gave insights on different research projects he worked on in order to develop several aminoglycoside antibiotics that are lacking the side effects associated with the clinical use of current aminoglycosides worldwide, including the irreversible ototoxicity.
Dr. Sonousi also spoke about the development of several novel aminoglycosides with structural changes in order to obtain novel compounds that lack the bacterial resistance associated with several known aminoglycosides that are in the market. He also mentioned several synthetic challenges they had during the development and during the chemical synthesis of the new compounds, and the unique selective reactions they developed and utilized to obtain the target compounds.
