Dr. Nicolò Santi (Marie Curie-Skłodowska Fellow)
I work as Marie Curie-Skłodowska Fellow (MSCA) fellow at the Prati-Caselli-Fini group located at Life Sciences Department at Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE, Italy). I completed my postgraduate studies in 2016, when I obtained a master degree in medicinal chemistry at UNIMORE.
During this time, I spent 7 months on an Erasmus+ programme at Cardiff University (School of Pharmacy, UK) working and writing my master dissertation on the synthesis of phosphonamidate (ProTides) and phosphonodiamidate prodrugs of novel acyclic nucleoside phosphonates under the supervision of Dr Fabrizio Pertusati.
I carried out my PhD work focusing on the design and development of novel organocatalytic artificial enzymes at Cardiff University (School of Chemistry, UK) under the supervision of Dr Louis Luk.
After obtaining my PhD degree in chemical biology in 2020, I spent 18 months working as Postdoctoral research associate at Cardiff University under the supervision of Dr Giulio Nannetti and Prof Andrea Brancale. During this time, I worked on the design, synthesis, and evaluation of novel inhibitors for Dengue Virus-2 (DENV-2).
Successively, I moved back to UNIMORE, where I spent 1 year on understanding β-lactam resistance in Acinetobacter baumanii under the supervision of Prof Emilia Caselli before starting the MSCA fellowship in October 2022.
Currently, my research focuses on the discovery of new β-lactamase inhibitors targeting clinically relevant β-lactamases, a class of bacterial enzymes responsible for the most widespread mechanism of antimicrobial resistance against β-lactam antibiotics.
ORCID: 0000-0001-6361-5457
Prof. Emilia Caselli (Associate Professor)
Prof. Fabio Prati (Full Professor)
Fabio Prati is a full professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE, https://international.unimore.it), Department of Life Sciences.
At the beginning of his research, he has been interested in enzymatic catalysis applied to organic synthesis, aiming to enantioselective synthesis of biologically active heterocycles or their precursors. In this context he was able to obtain by hydrolase-catalyzed reactions enantiomerically pure form of aziridines bearing stereogenic nitrogen as unique asymmetric center. In collaboration with Prof H. Alper (Ottawa University – Canada) he was then interested in homogeneous catalysis, exploring the carbonylative ring expansion of aziridines to beta-lactam, where he highlighted scope and limitation of this method and described the total synthesis of the carbapenem antibiotic PS-5. He also faced the total enantioselective synthesis fungi metabolites by ring-closing metathesis, identifying new stereoselective methodologies by means of boronic esters.
In close collaboration with molecular biologists (Prof Brian Shoichet, University of California San Francisco), crystallographers and microbiologists (Prof R Bonomo, Case Western Reserve University – Cleveland), he developed the stereoselective synthesis of acylamido- and sulfonamido-boronic acids for the inhibition of beta-lactamases, bacterial enzymes responsible of the growing antibacterial resistance. He also applied highly efficient synthetic strategies, such as click chemistry (Copper-Catalyzed Azide-Alkyne Cycloaddition) and multicomponent reactions, for the rapid generation structurally diverse boronic acids, obtaining several nM inhibitors of beta-lactamases, capable of restoring in vitro and in vivo the antibacterial activity of beta-lactam antibiotics.
He obtained several competitive grants from the Ministry of the University (Italy, PRIN, as participant or PI) and the National Institute of Health (USA, RO1 projects, nine four years grants as Co-PI and two as participant).
ORCID: 0000-0002-0650-9540