Deepali Prashar, PhD

Prior to my studies in graduate school, I worked at Ranbaxy Research Laboratories, Gurgaon, India for 2 years. I was a research chemist in a team focused on doing deliberate synthesis and analysis of impurities that may exist during the synthesis of active pharmacological ingredient (API) to evaluate their potential toxic effects. Working on multiple projects, the two years I spent at Ranbaxy trained me to be a team member and an independent researcher. Specifically I have experience in synthesis of organic molecules for applications in drug development and protein bio conjugation. During my Ph.D. training, I have worked on a number of projects independently and as a co-author. Some of my major work is described briefly below. The first project I led involved using β-cyclodextrin to host a adamantane-carboplatin analogue to enhance its delivery to human cancer cells in vitro.This work suggests that the use of deliberate host-guest chemistry can be a powerful strategy to influence the binding activities and other pharmaco-properties of therapeutic agents. The second project involved developing a new approach to prevent protein aggregation and surface adsorption using β-cyclodextrins. The cyclodextrin-modified proteins exhibited significant reduction in aggregation, surface adsorption and increased thermal stability as compared to unmodified proteins. Motivated by the fact that covalent modification with βCD can stabilize protein structures, I further explored modification of proteins with βCD for inducing folding in entirely unfolded proteins. The above studies have required me to conduct extensive organic synthesis, MALDI-TOF, dynamic light scattering (DLS), surface plasmon resonance (SPR), HPLC, and mammalian cell culture. I have hands on experience in all the above techniques and I am proficient in conducting them.