Alexandre Hofer

📣📣 Come and work with us! 📣📣

Interested in synthesising new molecules for Illumina's sequencing technologies of the future? Join our R&D team in Cambridge (UK)!

#UKChemJobs #ChemJobs

illumina.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/illumi...

📣📣 Come and work with us! 📣📣

Interested in synthesising new molecules for Illumina's sequencing technologies of the future? Join our R&D team in Cambridge (UK)!

#UKChemJobs #ChemJobs

illumina.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/illumi...

(S)-cargot (R)-cargot

How phototherapy could reverse antibiotic resistance Lars Stevens-Cullinane works in a dark room. But he's not processing negatives and printing photographs on light-sensitive paper; he's testing whether brief flashes of light can make drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics.

Light-activated metal complexes have been shown to disable antibiotic resistance enzymes in E. coli, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of existing antibiotics without harming human cells. doi.org/hbcxrb

Even I’m not sure this will end well. Graphics courtesy of Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis.

📆 Deadline: 14 November.
🩺 Doctoral Clinical Fellows programme (3-year PhD)
🤝 Exciting collaboration with the amazing @jeanninehess.bsky.social
Curating bioactive chemical space in pathogenic bacteria using accumulation signatures across species
✍️ Apply here: www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Proteome-Wide Target Identification Using Reactive Metallo-Scaffolds (r-mS): A Platform for Metallodrug Discovery Metal complexes offer unique opportunities as scaffolds in chemical biology and drug discovery, with tuneable geometry, modular coordination environments, and structural features not readily accessibl...

🧪 Excited to share our new work on reactive metallo-scaffolds (r-mS)! We combine metal complexes with chemoproteomics to discover new liganding sites across the proteome! Shout out to a great collaboration with GSK! Fantastic team effort 🫶🏻 chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

Biggest trial of four-day work week finds workers are happier and feel just as productive Compressing five days of work into four can create stress, but the benefits outweigh the downsides, sprawling study shows.

On the benefits of a 4-day work week: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Light-Activated Metal-dependent Protein Degradation (LAMP-D): A Heterobifunctional Ruthenium(II) Photosensitizer Targeting New Delhi Metallo-β-lactamase 1 The growth of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a significant global health threat, yet despite this alarming trend, antibiotic drug discovery has significantly slowed. Most compounds entering the cli...

📣Preprint 📣
You want to degrade a protein in Gram-negatives? We have tackled this challenge! Detailed study of our Light-Activated Metal-Dependent Protein Degradation LAMP-D system in targeting and rescuing NDM-1 activity. What an amazing team effort 🫶🏻 doi.org/10.26434/che...

Light-Activated Metal-Dependent Protein Degradation (LAMP-D)

Imagine a small molecule that degrades a target protein like PROTACs, but does so independently of any of the host cell's degradation machinery, so you can go and do targeted protein degradation in gram-negative bacteria: doi.org/10.26434/che...

#ChemSky

If you're looking to do a PhD in bioinorganic and medicinal chemistry in a wonderful research group at a world-leading institute, here's a great opportunity:

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

@jeanninehess.bsky.social

Two little snow-persons.

Happy New Year!

A hand-written list of importand party stuff: - myoosic - party popos - dansing - gaims

Great transition into the new year with a well-organised party...

Merry Xmas written in snow

A white Christmas for once...

Two blackboards with a drawing in the background, a blackboard with a child-made copy of the drawing.

Little copycats in the house...

A flash chromatography column....the bulb is the head of Gollum from lord of the rings. It is spelled C-O-L-L-U-M (collum)

Collum

#chemsky

Absolutely! All the horse pictures got me confused.

Do not confuse...

chemsky

Do not confuse...

stable aminal vs. stable animal

Do not confuse...

You can't handel the truth! An illustration of composer George Frideric Handel

⚠Invalid Handel

Thanks @cambridgeindy.bsky.social for publishing my view on closing the Mill Road Bridge for private vehicles.

What it means to be a successful male academic Prioritizing family life has earned me respect in my field — and my research has improved, too, says Dritjon Gruda. Prioritizing family life has earned me respect in my field — and my research has imp...

"Prioritizing family life has earned me respect in my field — and my research has improved, too"

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Faint aurora borealis, visible even from central Cambridge UK.

Quite faint in the middle of town, but one could clearly see the northern lights in Cambridge, UK.

You wouldn’t think that formaldehyde is an actual cellular signaling molecule, would you? But here we are!

When can AI deliver the drug discovery hits? The CACHE hit-finding competition highlights the potential of AI to identify small molecules that bind to hard-to-drug targets — and the long road ahead for these computational screening approaches. T...

This report on the CACHE competition is worth a read. It’s about as close as we’ve gotten to some open benchmarking of AI impact to the drug discovery process.

I’d suggest a title change to “When Can AI Deliver the Drugs?” though. A few more thoughts👇 1/

Absolutely agree. And I only play the nice guy on here, but reality might be closer to this meme:

"Then they took the extra step, rarely realized in such papers [...], of actually synthesizing hundreds of the hit molecules and experimentally testing them against the real proteins. (Faint cheers can be heard echoing from the lab benches and fume hoods)." 😅

We should spend a massively less amount of time politically kneecapping our most globally competitive export industry that employs more than 2% of the entire US workforce