COBRE Team

Funding Accomplishments

32 NIH awards to 21 investigators:
9 RO1s
10 R35s
2 DP2 NIH New Investigators
2 P01s
1 UO1
3 R21s
2 R03s
1 U54
2 R00s

NSF awards to 20 investigators

COBRE Director

 Joseph M. Fox, Francis Alison Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry; Department of  Materials Science &  Engineering
 jmfox@udel.edu
 Fox CV
 Fox Research

Phase I COBRE “graduates”

April Kloxin, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
In vitro neural disease models for high throughput screening

Catherine Leimkuhler Grimes,
Ph.D., Professor, Biochemistry and Organic Chemistry The Leimkuhler Grimes Group is using carbohydrate chemistry and bacterial cell wall engineering to aid in the understanding of inflammatory disease.

Don Watson, Ph.D., Willis Harrington Professor, Organic Chemistry
Don Watson’s group explores new transition metal catalysts for organic chemistry. We are developing new reactions for use in both organic synthesis and library development for medicinal chemistry.

Mary Watson, Ph.D., Professor, Organic Chemistry
Mary Watson’s group uses transition metal catalysts to develop enantioselective and stereospecific reactions. Their goal is greater efficiency and novel bond constructions in the synthesis of chiral drug-like molecules.

Joel Rosenthal, PhD., Professor, Inorganic Chemistry
The Rosenthal Group is developing electrochemical techniques for high throughput screening to discover new drug leads and is developing new approaches to photodynamic therapy.

Ed Lyman, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Physics and Physical Chemistry
Drug discovery is a long and costly process.  The Lyman Group is developing computational methods that will enable medicinal chemists to streamline the drug discovery process.

Phase II COBRE “graduates”

Catherine Fromen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Surface-functionalized nanoparticle adjuvants for pulmonary immune modulation

Jeffrey Mugridge, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Molecular mechanisms supporting bacterial survival within immune cells

Aditya Kunjapur, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
Designing real-time bacterial reporting of enzymes secreted by mammalian cells

Juan Perilla, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Elucidating the molecular mechanisms of small-molecule disruption of viral replication machinery

Karl Schmitz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences
Dissection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Clp protease assembly, activity and regulation

COBRE hires

Phase I, the center supported the hire of three faculty.

William Chain  Studies the area of natural products synthesis and medicinal chemistry.

Shuo Wei  Studies the regulation of cell signaling by extracellular metalloproteinases in development and disease, and he is PI of an active R01 from NIGMS.

Karl Schmitz  Studies Clp protease function and regulation with small molecule probes

Phase II Hires

Ariel Alperstein is focused on developing new ultrafast vibrational spectroscopy techniques for investigating biological systems on the sub-micron scale

Marco Messina is focused on the creation of functional macromolecular materials for probing biological systems

Phase I Pilot Project Awardees

Lars Gundlach.   Ultrafast spectroscopy of photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy

Arun Kumar. Development of a nanoparticle-based theranostic agent to treat IBC metastasis

Eric Bloch.  Design of metal-organic cage molecules for aerosol pulmonary theranostics

Catherine Fromen.  Design of metal-organic cage molecules for aerosol pulmonary theranostics

Ramona Neunuebel.   Molecular mechanisms supporting bacterial survival within immune cells

Christopher Kloxin.  CNA aptamer screening library for TNF binding

William Chain.  Englerin A – A future human chemotherapeutic

Aimee Jaramillo-Lambert. Molecular mechanisms of Topoisomerase II regulation in meiotic chromosome segregation

Edward Lyman.  Measuring and simulating adenosine receptor ligand unbinding kinetics

Phase II Pilot Project Awardees

Jeremy Bird.  Developing riboCapZyme-seq, a new method for the detection and quantitation of metabolite capping on translated RNAs

Jodi Hadden-Perilla.  Elucidating and flipping the conformational switch that regulates hepatitis B virus capsid assembly

Alexei Kananenka. Computational modeling of radiolabeled nanomaterials for cancer therapy

Aditya Kunjapur.  Investigating biosynthesis of a photolabile amino acid for polypeptide control

Molly Sutherland. Development of CcsBA, the holocytorchrome c synthase, as a novel antibiotic target

Emil Hernandez-Pagan.Tailored nanocrystals for NIR generation of ROS for photodynamic therapy

Ariel Alperstein.  Investigating the effect of microplastics on chaperone protein structure and function

Austin Keeler. Deciphering the molecular landscape of neurotrophin driven lineage decisions by neural mass cytometry

Marco Messina.  3-Dimensional Cluster-Based Materials for Multimodal Bioimaging of Reactive Oxygen/Nitrogen Species

John Koh. Cross-linking antigens for targeted immunotherapies

External Advisory Committee

Paramjit Arora, Ph.D., Professor, New York University

Peter Chien, Ph.D., Professor, University of Massachusetts

Andrew Combs, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Head of Chemistry, Prelude Therapeutics

Spencer Dreher, Ph.D., Research Fellow and Head of the Process Chemistry Automation Lab, Merck Process

Klaus Gawrisch, Ph.D., Senior Investigator and Chief of the Laboratory of Membrane Biochemistry and Biophysics, NIAAA, NIH

Karl Scheidt, Ph.D., Professor and Director of the Northwestern Center for Molecular Innovation and Drug Discovery, Northwestern University

Stefan Serafianos, Ph.D., Professor, Emory University

Associate Directors in Medicinal Chemistry and Translational Research

Peter Bernstein, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at University of Delaware, Principal, PhaRmaB, LLC

John Koh, Ph.D.,  Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Associate Director, Delaware Biotechnology Institute

Melinda Duncan, Ph.D.,  Professor, Biological Sciences, Professor, Animal and Food Sciences