Melie Hide

• MChem with Hons in Medicinal Chemistry
• Mapping reactive residues on proteins using electrophilic Fraglites

My literature project this year is about researching Antibody drug-conjugates and their use in cancer treatment, this has sparked my interest in this field, and so I have been reading further into the chemistry behind different cancer treatments. From this, my supervisor and I sat down to discuss which project would allow me to look further into the chemistry within an 8 week project. We discussed a project about protein labelling, inspired by my antibody drug conjugate work, which led to the project on using covalent version of fragilities to map protein interactions.

Fraglites are a set of minimal molecules expressing common molecular features that are necessary for molecular recognition of a ligand by a biological macromolecule e.g. proteins. I will design and synthesise covalent Fraglites containing functional groups with “drug-like reactivity” displayed on halogenated fragments, then the approach will then be applied to novel proteins of relevance to cancer.

Funding source: Newcastle University

Project supervisor: Professor. Michael J. Waring