December 8, 2016. One of GNOBB’s executive members, Dr. Akhter Hossain, who also won the NRB scientist award two years back, recently secured a 0.8 million AUSD grant (207-2019) from National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC, grant number: APP1122170 ) for the research project entitled “Unraveling fibrosis by pharmacological targeting of the G protein-coupled receptor, RXFP1” . Dr. Akhter Hossain and his associates have recently engineered a single-chain relaxin peptide which turns out to be a major breakthrough for the potential treatment of fibrosis and heart failure.
They also published the following four outstanding articles in high impact journals in the current year, 2016.
1. Separovic, F., Wade, J. D., and Hossain, M. A* (2016) Total Chemical Synthesis of an Intra-A-Chain Cystathionine Human Insulin Analogue that has Enhanced Thermal Stability. Angew Chem Int Ed 2016 Oct 20. doi: 10.1002/anie.201607101 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27761974
2. Patil, N. A., Tailhades, J., Karas, J. A., Separovic, F., Wade, J. D., and Hossain, M. A.* (2016) A One-Pot Chemically Cleavable Bis-Linker Tether Strategy for the Synthesis of Heterodimeric Peptides. Angew Chem Int Ed DOI: 10.1002/anie.201604733. [COVER STORY and HOT PAPER] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27529162
3. Hossain, M. A.*, Kocan, M., Yao, S. T., Royce, S. G., Nair, V. B., Siwek, C., Patil, N. A., Harrison, I. P., Rosengren, K. J., Selemidis, S., Summers, R. J., Wade, J. D., Bathgate, R. A. D., and Samuel, C. S. (2016) A single-chain derivative of the relaxin hormone is a functionally selective agonist of the G protein-coupled receptor, RXFP1. Chem Sci 7, 3805-3819.
4. Patil, N. A., Hughes, R. A., Rosengren, K. J., Kocan, M., Ang, S. Y., Tailhades, J., Separovic, F., Summers, R. J., Grosse, J., Wade, J. D., Bathgate, R. A., and Hossain, M. A.* (2016) Engineering of a Novel Simplified Human Insulin-Like Peptide 5 Agonist. J Med Chem 59 2118-2125.
GNOBB is very proud of Dr. Akhter’s outstanding achievements and wish him godspeed and all the best in his future endeavor.