Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Alex Deiters, University of Pittsburgh
Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Alex Deiters, University of Pittsburgh (Host: James Chen)
**This seminar is available for in-person attendance.**
"Breaking and Making Covalent Bonds in Cells and Animals"
About the Seminar
We are using light-induced cleavage of covalent bonds to place biological processes, such as protein translocation, signal transduction, gene expression, or gene editing, and cell survival, under optical control. Specifically, we are site-specifically introducing photocaging groups into proteins and nucleic acids, thereby disrupting protein-protein, protein-substrate, protein-nucleic acid, and nucleic acid-nucleic acid interactions. Light exposure removes the caging groups and allows for activation of biological function with temporal and spatial precision. More recently, we have developed nucleic acid aptamer-directed covalent bond formation to specific target proteins, which enabled the installation of functional handles for protein detection, protein inhibition, and protein tracking at cell surfaces. We also developed covalent cell surface modifications for the redirection of CAR T cells. This generally applicable approach enabled the installation of antibody and small molecule adaptors onto T cells, providing targeted tumor cell lysis in a mouse xenograft model. I will present select examples of making and breaking covalent bonds from these developments.
About the Speaker
Alex was born in Germany and studied Chemistry at the University of Münster from 1993-1998. He received his diploma degree in 1998 and his doctoral degree in 2000 for work in Professor Hoppe's group on new cyclization reactions with enantiomerically enriched allyllithium species. In 2001 he joined Professor Martin's lab at the University of Texas at Austin where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the total synthesis of indole alkaloids. In 2002 he began another postdoctorate in Professor Schultz's lab at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla where he developed genetic code expansion methodologies for unnatural amino acids.
Alex received several awards for his Ph.D. and postdoctoral work, most importantly for the best dissertation at the Departments of Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Science at the University of Münster in 2001. His studies were continously supported by fellowships from the German National Academic Foundation, the Fund of the Chemical Industry, the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, and the German Research Foundation.
In 2004, Alex joined the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009 and to Full Professor in 2012. He moved his lab to the University of Pittsburgh in September 2013, where he currently is a Professor of Chemistry. His lab's research interests are in the areas of Synthetic Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Synthetic Biology, and range from organometallic chemistry and natural product synthesis to the discovery of small molecule modifiers of biological pathways as well as cell, protein, and nucleic acid engineering for optical control.
Alex is a member of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, the Molecular Biophysics and Structural Biology Program at the University of Pittsburgh, the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Center for Nucleic Acids Science & Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has published over one hundred sixty peer-reviewed papers, written six book chapters and 14 review articles, has presented over one hundred sixty research seminars, and has consulted for several pharmaceutical companies. Alex is a member of the editorial advisory board of ChemBioChem and ChemPhotoChem, and a member of the editorial board of Scientific Reports. He also also been a guest editor for special issues of Methods in Enzymology, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, and ChemBioChem.
For his research accomplishments, Alex received a Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Award from the March of Dimes Foundation, a Sigma Xi Research Faculty Award, a Cottrell Scholar Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Teva USA Scholars Grant from the American Chemical Society, a Thieme Chemistry Journal Award, an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Grant, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations Grant, an NCSU Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award, and a Charles E. Kaufman Foundation New Initiative Research Award. Research discoveries from his lab have been highlighted by various news outlets.