The goal of our laboratory is to design targeted drugs and targeted drug delivery approaches. By targeting drugs to diseased tissues, toxic side effects can be avoided, while drug efficacy is enhanced. To tackle this important problem, our laboratory is devoted to the development of approaches that will deliver drugs, proteins and nucleic acids to diseased tissues and not normal tissues. This challenge is being met by exploiting discoveries from our laboratory in enzymology, prodrug design, chemical biology and nanobiotechnology. The experimental approach taken by our laboratory is highly multidisciplinary, relying on the tools of synthetic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, enzymology, molecular biology, biochemical pharmacology, X-ray crystallography, molecular modeling and spectroscopy to address our goal.

Best wishes to Adrian Fegan with his new employer, BSM, Inc., a fast growing industrial research consultant company.

Congrats to Amit Ganger for being awarded a University of Minnesota Dissertation Fellowship for the upcoming academic year. Only 137 awards were made to graduate students from across the entire university.

Rick is the recipient of the 2012 University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy Excellence in Graduate Education Faculty Award. He thanks all his current and former graduate students for making this possible!

Congrats to Amit Ganger for winning a “Best Poster” Award at this years MIKI meeting at the University of Iowa.

A big welcome to Aniekan Okon (MedChem) and Jing Liu (Chem) as our two newest first year students to join the group.

Rick organized and chaired the Synthetic Biology Track and Amit Ganger presented a poster on his nucleic acid self-assembly research at the, 9^th Annual Foundations of Nanoscience (FNANO12), Snowbird, UT, April 16-19, 2012.

Welcome to Lai Zhang and Shawn Zwonar as our newest undergraduate researchers to join the group.

Rick organized and chaired the Presidential Theme Symposium, “Materials as Medicines”, during the 243^nd American Chemical Society National Meeting, March 25-29, 2012 in San Diego, CA.

Kudos to Adrian Fegan, Sid Kumarapperuma and Amit Ganger for giving great talks and to Matt Cuellar for presenting a poster at the 243^nd American Chemical Society National Meeting, March 25-29, 2012 in San Diego, CA. They covered a variety of uses for chemically self-assembled antibody nanostructures (CSANS).

Congrats to Amit Ganger, Adrian Fegan and Sid Kumarapperuma on the publication of their paper, “Programmable Self-Assembly of Antibody-Oligonucleotide Conjugates as Small Molecule and Protein Carriers”, J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 134, 2895-2897 (2012).