Enzyme-mediated modification of peptide hydrogels to tailor them for drug delivery and tissue engineering
Academic Supervisors: Prof. Neil R. Thomas (School of Chemistry); Dr Cathy Merry (Faculty of Medicine)
Industrial partner: Dr Kamal Badiani, Pepceuticals Ltd, Enderby, Leicester LE19 4SD
This is an exciting opportunity for a student with a background in Chemistry, Biochemistry or closely related areas who has a strong interest in applying organic synthetic chemistry and biocatalysis to the creation of new peptide-based materials for biomedical applications. The successful applicant will receive training in mammalian cell culture and biomaterials characterisation as well as a range of synthetic and analytical chemistry techniques. The project will be conducted in the Centre for Biomolecular Sciences at Nottingham which has state of the art facilities for chemistry, synthetic biology and regenerative medicine. The student will also have access to additional analytical instrumentation in the Chemistry building and Nanoscale and Microscale Research Centre at Nottingham. Pepceuticals Ltd, the industrial partner in the collaboration are one of the leading providers of therapeutic peptides. Their close proximity to Nottingham will allow significant academic-industrial interactions throughout the PhD and the student will undertake a placement in their laboratory facility.There is an urgent demand for non-animal derived extracellular matrix components to act as cell scaffolds for a variety of applications in regenerative medicine. An alternative material that could meet these requirements are hydrogels generated from self-assembling synthetic peptides. By modifying the basic hydrogel peptide building blocks using a combination of enzymatic and synthetic chemistry methods, the PhD student will generate a range of new materials decorated with defined quantities of drugs, growth supplements or other molecules. These molecules will then be evaluated with a range of appropriate cell lines.
Click here to apply for this project.