Laboratorio di ricerca
| Lab. name | Natural Products for Medicinal Chemistry |
|---|---|
| Principal Investigator | Federica Pellati |
| Components | Federica Pellati (Principal Investigator
- Professore Associato
)
Virginia Brighenti (Collaboratore - Assegnista di Ricerca ) Lisa Anceschi (Collaboratore - Dottoranda ) |
| Description | The search for bioactive molecules from nature continues to play an important role in fashioning new medicinal agents. Natural compounds are indeed characterized by unique and favorable properties, a significant structural diversity, and a range of interesting pharmacological activities. Therefore, they are privileged chemical entities in medicinal chemistry as starting points for the development of new drugs with improved properties over their progenitors. In this context, a multi-disciplinary strategy is applied in our lab in order to evaluate the biological activity of extracts from different medicinal plants (especially those rich in phenolics and cannabinoids), to isolate and characterize their components and to identify their mechanism/s of action, by taking advantage of an integrated expertise from chemistry to biology and medicine (external collaboration). In our research activity, a special role is devoted to the development and application of innovative methods for the multi-component analysis of plant extracts, based on chromatographic techniques hyphenated with mass spectrometry in the so-called metabolite fingerprinting or profiling. As for the biological activity, we are mainly interested in the discovery of natural bioactive compounds against proliferative diseases, such as those involving either cancer cells or microbial species. |
| Address | via Giuseppe Campi, 103 - 41125 Modena |
| Keywords | natural products, medicinal chemistry, extraction, isolation, analysis, biological activity |
| ERC Sectors | LS7_3 Pharmacology, pharmacogenomics, drug discovery and design, drug therapy PE4_9 Method development in chemistry PE5_18 Molecular chemistry |
| Instrumentation | HPLC-ESI-MSn (CIGS), HPLC-ESI-MS/MS (CIGS), HPLC-ESI-HRMS (CIGS), HPLC-UV/ DAD and ELSD, GC-MS (LADAC), GC-FID. |
| Research Lines | Translational Medicine |
| Methodologies | Extraction methods, chromatography, mass spectrometry, isolation and structural elucidation, in vitro and in vivo biological assays (external collaboration). |