Meet Andy Phan
Major: Biochemistry Major, Music Minor
Graduation Year: May 2016 Field of Study: Medicinal Chemistry Abstract:Glioblastoma is one of the most deadly forms of human cancer with a median survival of approximately only 12 months after optimal treatment including surgical resection, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy1. Current adjuvant chemotherapeutics including DNA-alkylating agents such as temozolomide and carmustine do show a significant survival benefit in 25% of patients but suffer from difficulty in crossing the blood-brain barrier for drug delivery and resistance due to DNA-repairing alkyl guanine transferases5. Emerging studies have begun to highlight the potential of mitochondrial metabolism targeting agents instead of DNA-targeting agents as novel treatments of cancer. Scaffold 12M11 was determined to be possibly effective in the treatment of glioblastoma via oxidative phosphorylation inhibition. As such, synthetic routes for the scaffold and analogs including only 4-5 steps were developed. These routes were utilized to synthesize numerous analogs in an effort to discover a potent and stable drug that could be used to treat glioblastoma multiforme via oxidative phosphorylation inhibition. |
My Experience:
I worked in a medicinal chemistry synthesis lab and having been a supplemental instruction leader for both general chemistry and organic chemistry, it was nice to actually apply a lot of what I had learned. It was definitely tiring at first, working at least 45+ hours a week, but definitely eye opening! One of the main reasons why I wanted to enter the Green Fellowship was to truly experience the life of a researcher and to see whether or not I would enjoy it. I think one of the most valuable researcher traits that I improved upon while down at UTSW was resilience. In chemistry research, it is a lot of trial and error. As such, I had a lot of bumps in the road while working on my reactions; There was a good two weeks where absolutely nothing was working! I'll admit that I was bogged down about this for a bit, but I kept reanalyzing my methods, continually devised new schemes to achieve my product, and in the end I was able to obtain it! Advice for future students:
During your time in the Green Fellowship, it is okay to make mistakes; no one is expecting you to be perfect. What matters is how you recover and learn from them! |
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