On January 31st, Jack Hanna had his PhD viva. Thanks to Prof Chris Huston for serving as external examiner, Prof Marcus Lee (the newest member of our division) for serving as internal examiner, and Prof David Horn for acting as convenor.
The day before Prof. Chris Huston gave a great seminar about his work to optimise MMV665917 and also identify the molecular target and the compound’s mode of action. Thanks for the stimulating ideas and discussion!
While he was here, we also held our end-of-project meeting for the Lead Optimisation program for CpKRS. Chris’ lab carried out a lot of the in vitro and in vivo work for the project. It has been great collaborating with his group and the DDU on this project. Me and the lab have learned a lot about cryptsporidiosis drug discovery first hand!
Jack was supported by the MRC DTP programme and co-supervised by Dr. Susan Wyllie. He did a great job setting up mode of action tools for Cryptosporidium. This includes thermal proteome profiling and genetic tools. He set these up using lysyl-tRNA synthetase (CpKRS) as a target-compound pair to establish new methodologies.
Thanks to Beatriz Baragana and the Apicomplexan Portfolio Team and the Lead Op team for their help (Nicola Caldwell, Malcolm Tayor, Ian Gilbert, Kevin Read, in vivo Team). And thanks to Victor Corpas-Lopez and Simona Seizova for their help.
Jack joined Dr. Clare Harding’s lab at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology at the University of Glasgow as a postdoc soon after his viva. We wish you all the best and look forward to seeing you at future parasitology conferences!
Pawlowic Lab 