About our group
Our team is making metal elements biocompatible. Why? Well, metals offer special chemical and physical properties that cannot be achieved with purely organic molecules. Because of these properties, compounds of metal elements find many uses in medicine, mainly as contrast agents for diagnostic imaging, and as therapeutic agents for cancer treatment. But for this, the metal must be made biocompatible, using a coat from an organic molecule. These organic molecules, called chelators, have a primary purpose to strongly bind (coordinate) to the metal. But they can be modified to perform additional functions. For example, bifunctional chelators serve to connect metals to biomolecules, such as peptides and antibodies. Our efforts go even beyond that. We are integrating more functions into the chelators, so that they can perform rather complex and difficult chemical tasks. These multi-functional chelators will enable synthesis of new imaging and therapeutic agents, or greatly simplify preparation of the existing ones. In other words: we are making complex molecules that are simple to use.
