Integrated Calendar

Recently developed DIANA platform (DNA-linked Inhibitor ANtibody Assay) is suitable for both ultrasensitive protein detection in in vitro diagnostics and for enzyme inhibitor or protein ligand screening in drug discovery. As its name suggests, we originally designed DIANA to detect enzymes and its inhibitors, but we later showed that it is well suited also for detection of receptors and its ligands, to screen for protein-protein interaction inhibitors and for detection of small molecules. DIANA overcomes the limitations of current state of the art methods, as it can detect zeptomole amounts of targets, has a linear range of up to six logs and is applicable to biological matrices.

Screening of chemical libraries is an important step in drug discovery, but it remains challenging for targets, which are difficult to express and purify, and current methods tend to produce false results. The sensitivity and selectivity of DIANA enables quantitative high-throughput screening of enzyme inhibitors, receptor ligands or inhibitors of protein-protein interactions with unpurified proteins. DIANA addresses also the remaining limitations of the current screening methods, as it allows high-throughput screening with high signal-to-noise ratio (Z’ factor > 0.9), sensitive hit discovery and ultralow rate of false positives (< 0.02%); while quantitatively determining the inhibition potency from a single well and requiring only picogram to nanogram quantities of potentially unpurified protein target (e.g. in human serum).

At DIANA Biotechnologies, a recently established spin-off from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in Prague, we aim to fully exploit the potential of the platform and to become center for development of new diagnostics and drug discovery. We are building up infrastructure for screening and hit to lead conversion, including our own ~150,000 compound library, which we will screen for medicinally relevant targets, taking just one week per target. The most promising compounds will be optimized for potency, selectivity, physical properties, pharmacology profile and in vitro and in vivo efficacy, where DIANA-based high-throughput ADME pharmacology tests can also be applied.

In our talk, we will briefly summarize the assay protocol and its performance on model targets, as well as recent developments at DIANA Biotechnologies. We will discuss in more detail examples of current internal projects, mainly of the development of selectivity panels (example of inhibitors of human carbonic anhydrases) and of the first drug discovery project directed on influenza RNA polymerase and its different subunits.

The hunt for Dark Matter is reaching at a crossroads - after two decades of incredible pace, where five orders of magnitude in parameter space were covered, no unambiguous signal has emerged for interaction between the alleged particles and our normal, baryonic matter. The next generation detectors, aiming at another order of magnitude sensitivity increase, are on the runway, and the question of what will be next takes interesting turns.
I will cover the evidence for the existence of Dark Matter, present the state of the art results from the XENON1T experiment, and play with some novel ideas for the next step, trying to move the lamppost to where Dark Matter may still stay hidden.

Cell penetrating peptides have a unique potential for targeted drug delivery. While ATP-driven endocytosis is known to play a major role in their internalization, there has been also ample evidence for the importance of passive translocation for which the direct mechanism, where the peptide is thought to directly pass through the membrane via a temporary pore, has been widely advocated. In this talk, I will question this view and demonstrate that arginine-rich cell penetrating peptides can instead enter vesicles and cells by inducing multilamellarity and fusion, analogously to the action of calcium ions.

Allolio C., Magarkar A., Jurkiewiczf P., Baxová K., Javanainen M., Mason P.E., Sachl R., Cebecauer M., Hof M., Horinek D., Heinz V., Rachel R., Zieglerg C.M., Schrofel A., Jungwirth P.: Arginine-rich cell-penetrating peptides induce membrane multilamellarity and subsequently enter via formation of a fusion pore. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 115 (2018) 11923.

Thermal motions of atoms is an ever-present phenomenon in all of solid state physics. Phonons, quanta of heat, is the quasiparticule used to describe thermal motion in solids. Under normal conditions phonons are the dominant mechanism that govern transport and the largest contribution to entropy. I want to understand how phonons evolve in time, temperature, and how they behave when they interact strongly with each other or other quasiparticles.
The inherent disorder in thermal motions makes theoretical predictions challenging. I will present methodological developments in finite temperature first principles simulations, specifically targeting strongly anharmonic systems. The method employs model Hamiltonians that explicitly depend on temperature. I will present applications pertaining to thermal conductivity, inelastic neutron spectra and phase stabilities, reproducing non-trivial temperature dependencies.