Kathie Seley-Radtke, PhD
Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
UM-BILD Translational Project, Development of Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Inhibitors
Current Fields of Interest:
Medicinal/Synthetic Bioorganic/Organic Chemistry and Drug Design: Discovery, design and synthesis of nucleoside/nucleotide and heterocyclic enzyme inhibitors with chemotherapeutic emphasis in the areas of antiviral, anticancer, antibiotic, and antiparasitic targets. Primary goals include development of potent inhibitors to shut down disease replication pathways through a combination of cross-disciplinary synthetic, biological screening, mechanistic, and structure-based drug design techniques.
The primary focus for the Seley-Radtke laboratories involves the design and synthesis of flexible nucleoside (“fleximers”) and nucleobases (“flex-bases) inhibitors as a powerful approach to overcome the development of resistance to currently used therapeutics. The fleximers are able retain full potency when faced with “escape mutations” in biologically critical enzymatic systems – the inherent flexibility of the inhibitors allows them to conformationally adjust to steric and electronic clashes encountered in the binding site, and to engage secondary amino acids not previously involved in the enzyme’s mechanism of action.