Date of Award
Spring 6-12-2026
Document Type
Masters Thesis
Degree Name
M.S. in Chemistry and Biochemistry
Organizational Unit
College of Natural Science and Mathematics, Chemistry and Biochemistry
First Advisor
Sunil Kumar
Second Advisor
Brian Michel
Third Advisor
Scott Horowitz
Fourth Advisor
Daniel Linseman
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
All Rights Reserved.
Keywords
Interactions, Neurodegenerative, Oligopyridyl, Protein, Synthesis
Abstract
Protein-Protein Interactions are the foundation of many regulatory processes in physiological systems. Perturbations in these processes such as mutations or conditional cellular stress can cause the mutation or misfolding of essential proteins, leading to aberrant Protein-Protein Interactions (aPPIs) that have cascading negative effects on essential biochemical processes. aPPIs are implicated as the leading cause and progressor of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, and Huntington’s Disease. While many attempts at therapeutic treatments for neurodegenerative diseases have emerged in the last 30 years, the modulation of disease related aPPIs has proven to be a demanding and complex task as the interactions between relevant proteins occur between a large variety of chemical moieties and protein surface areas.
Chemically diverse synthetic libraries of organic compounds have recently been employed to nullify aPPIs in vitro and in vivo. Previous libraries of compounds have proven both synthetically difficult and relatively non-scalable. In this work, we present a family of Oligopyridyl (OP) compounds that are synthetically trivial, scalable, and potent antagonists of relevant aPPIs in the human brain.
Copyright Date
6-2026
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Rights Holder
George Cole Jernigan
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
160 pgs
File Size
5.2 MB
Recommended Citation
Jernigan, George Cole, "High Throughput, Late-Stage Drug Diversification in Neurodegenerative Disease" (2026). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2719.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/2719