Carston R. Wagner, PhD

• 3M University Relations Award, 2002
• Teacher of the Semester, PharmD II, 1999
• N.I.H. First Award, 1993
• N.I.H. National Research Service Award, 1987 – 1990
• NSF Student Fellow to NATO Advanced Study Institute, 1986
• Dreyfus Undergraduate Research Scholar, 1980

In general the use of anticancer drugs is associated with a variety of toxic side-effects. To tackle this important problem, our laboratory is devoted to the development of approaches that will deliver anticancers drug, proteins and nucleic acids to cancer tissues and not normal tissues. This challenge is being met by exploiting discoveries from our laboratory in prodrug design 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.

• Nucleosides with Antiviral and Anticancer Activity, U.S. Patent #6,475,985, issued 11/05/02.
• Small Molecules for Inhibition of Function and Drug Delivery to Leukocytes, U. S. Patent, #6,881,747 B2; issued 4/19/05.
• Nucleoside Phosphoramidates and Nucleoside Phosphoramidases, U. S. Patent, #7217523; issued 5/15/07.
• Protein Nanorings, U. S. Patent (pending).

• Li, Qing, So, Christopher, Fegan Adrian, Sarikaya, Mehmet, and Vallera, Daniel A., and Wagner, Carston R.“Chemically Self-Assembled Antibody Nanorings (CSANs): Design and Characterization of an Anti-CD3 IgM Biomimetic:”, J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 132, 17247–17257 (2010).
• Ghosh, Brahma, Benyumov, Alexey O., Ghosh, Phalguni, Avdulov, Svetlana, Jia, Yan, Dahlberg, Peter S., Peterson, Mark, Smith, Karen, Polunovsky, Vitaly A., Bitterman, Peter B., and Wagner, Carston R., “"Non-Toxic Chemical Interdiction of the Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition by Targeting Cap-dependent Translation", ACS Chemical Biology, 4, 367-377 (2009).
• Chou, Tsui-Fen, So, Christopher, Carlson, Jonathan T. C., White, Brian R., Sarikaya, Mehmet, and Wagner, Carston, "Enzyme Nanorings", ACS Nano, 2, 2519-2525 (2008). (Highlighted paper)
• Chou, Tsui-fen, Baraniak, Janina, Kaczmarek, Renata, Zhou, Xin, Cheng, Jilin, Ghosh, Brahma, and Wagner, Carston R., “Phosphoramidate Pronucleotides: A Comparison of the Phosphoramidase Substrate Specificity of Human and E. coli Histidine Triad Nucleotide Binding Proteins (Hint1)”, Molecular Pharmaceutics, 4, 2, 208-217 (2007).
• Kim, Jisook, Griesegraber, George, W., Chou, Tsui-fen., and Wagner, Carston R., "Direct Measurement of Nucleoside Monophosphate Delivery from a Phosphoramidate Pronucleotide by Stable Isotope Labeling and LC-ESI-MS/MS,' Molecular Pharmaceutics 1, 102-11 (2004).