Ivana Mejdrová won the Doctorandus Prize at Česká hlava (The Czech Mind) competition
Ivana Mejdrová from Radim Nencka Group at IOCB Prague has won the Doctorandus Prize in the prestigious Česká hlava (The Czech Mind) competition. The prize is awarded to PhD students for an innovative approach, the most significant achievement, professional or scientific activity.
Ivana Mejdrová was awarded for her doctoral project of the development of inhibitors active against picornaviruses responsible for diseases such as rhinitis, encephalitis, or hepatitis. She has focused on the PI4KB enzyme creating membrane markers, which are used by the viruses for their multiplication.
Viruses can force the enzyme to create many more markers and then build replication complexes on them. Ivana and her colleagues succeeded in developing inhibitors targeting the active site where ATP, the primary source of energy in cells, binds naturally. These new inhibitors are the most potent anti-picornavirus agents so far.
- Ivana Mejdrová, Dominika Chalupská, Pavla Plačková, Christin Müller, Michal Šála, Martin Klíma, Adriana Baumlová, Hubert Hřebabecký, Eliška Procházková, Milan Dejmek, Dmytro Strunin, Jan Weber, Gary Lee, Marika Matoušová, Helena Mertlíková-Kaiserová, John Ziebuhr, Gabriel Birkus, Evzen Boura, and Radim Nencka. Rational Design of Novel Highly Potent and Selective Phosphatidylinositol 4-Kinase IIIβ (PI4KB) Inhibitors as Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Agents and Tools for Chemical Biology. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry 2017 60 (1), 100-118. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b01465
