Chemical Biology & Radiation Therapy

Chemical biology is one field that exists in the overlap between biology and chemistry. It involves using the techniques, tools, and methods of chemistry to the study of biological systems. Biochemists study the chemical side of biological organisms. They study the chemical reactions that happen inside organisms and the molecular make up of compounds found in organisms. On the other hand it involves stimulating biological systems using chemicals. For example, you might add a chemical or a specially designed sample of molecules to a tissue or cell and see what impact it has. The goal is often to figure out more detail about how the interactions work. Chemical biology usually involves smaller molecules than biochemistry, which looks at large molecules like nucleic acids and proteins.

Glycans play a vital role in modulating protein structure and function from involvement in protein folding, solubility and stability in regulation of tissue distribution, recognition specificity, and biological activity. They can act as both positive and negative regulators of protein function, providing an additional level of control with respect to genetic and environmental conditions. Due to the complexity of glycosylated protein forms, elucidating structural and functional information has been challenging task for researchers, but the recent development of chemical biology-based tools and techniques is bridging these knowledge gaps. This glycoprotein chemical biology, describing the development and application of glycoprotein and glycan synthesis technologies for understanding and manipulating protein glycosylation.

The Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology section is engaged in a variety of research activities that are underpinned by organic synthesis. Research activities cover a broad range of topics from the development of new reaction methodologies and catalysts, target asymmetric synthesis of molecules with profound biological activity, through to peptide, protein and DNA chemistry, radiochemistry and molecule imaging, single molecule detection, mass spectrometry, bionanotechnology, biocatalysis, chemical genetics and directed evolution.

The interface between inorganic chemistry and biology has been a rich one dating back several centuries. In more recent times, this field has been referred to as bioinorganic chemistry. The core of bioinorganic chemistry has focused on the study of metal sites in metalloproteins and metalloenzymes. Synthetic chemistry, an important component of chemical biology, has been used by bioinorganic chemists to make small molecule spectroscopy and functional models of metal sites in proteins. In addition, the use of small molecules to study biology also applies to inorganic complexes. 

Mass spectrometry involves the measurement of the mass-to-charge ratio of ions. It has become an essential analytical tool in biological research and can be used to characterize a wide variety of biomolecules such as sugars, proteins, and oligonucleotides.

Chemical biology and proteomics strategies have rapidly emerged as cost effective yet powerful preclinical approaches for the discovery and identification of novel drugs and targets. Advances in the development and combination of novel chemical tools, bioorthogonal techniques, disease-relevant phenotypic systems, chemoinformatics, and chemical proteomics now provide robust and high-throughput workflows for interrogating drug-target-phenotype relationships. These efforts are poised to significantly enrich preclinical discovery programs and are illuminating a new paradigm for the development of novel drugs modulating novel targets.

Computational questions in this area address predicting protein structure and folding, visualization of biomolecules and systems, prediction and analysis of interactions of biological molecules with drugs, small molecules and other biological macromolecules, predicting enzyme function from structure, and predicting protein network interactions. Huge improvements in computing hardware technology have enabled rapid advances in computational biology.

The field of chemical biology embraces the use of new chemical techniques and approaches to solve biologic problems. An ever-increasing exchange of ideas between chemists and biologists is improving drug discovery. Other fields are likely to benefit, too.

Ubiquitin is a small regulatory protein found in most tissues of eukaryotic organisms i.e. it occurs ubiquitously. The addition of ubiquitin to a substrate protein is called ubiquitination or less frequently ubiquitylation. Ubiquitination affects proteins in many ways: it can mark them for degradation via the proteasome, alter their cellular location, affect their activity, and promote or prevent protein interactions.

siRNA or small interfering RNAs owe their origins to the difficulties the scientific community faced utilizing classical and reverse genetics methods in studying gene expression. Disrupting genes to study their functions is not always optimal; neither is mapping mutations back to their genes easy. The whole process is expensive as well as time-consuming, which is why a lot of effort has been devoted to develop methods to silence gene expression in a sequence specific manner using nucleic acids. They have the potential to be powerful tools in the field of chemical biology to study the chemistry of gene expression in therapeutic targets of bacteria and viruses.

Researchers in the Chemical Biology and Pharmacology cluster use the principles of medicinal chemistry to study drugs and drug action, to develop synthetic compounds for exploration as new pharmaceuticals, and to probe and control normal and abnormal biological processes. Expertise includes synthetic chemistry (including combinations and natural product synthesis), structure-guided and computational drug design, toxicology and metabolism, and bioassay development. Research emphasizes the integration of biology and chemistry, ensuring that students in the cluster receive strong training in the interface between both fields and learn to exploit chemical diversity as a means to understand biology and advance human health.

Recently, significant advances have been made in live cell imaging owing to the rapid development of selective labeling of proteins in-vivo. Green fluorescent protein (GFP) was the first example of fluorescent reporters genetically introduced to the protein of interest (POI). While GFP and various types of engineered fluorescent proteins (FPs) have been actively used for live cell imaging for many years, the size and the limited windows of fluorescent spectra of GFP and its variants set limits on possible applications. Synthetic fluorescent probes are smaller than fluorescent proteins, often have improved photochemical properties, and offer a larger variety of colors. The chemical recognition-based labeling reaction often suffers from the compromised selectivity of metal-ligand interaction with the cytosolic environment, consequently producing high background signals. The Use of protein-substrate interactions or enzyme-mediated reactions generally show improved specificity, but each method has its limitations. 

Radiation therapy or radiotherapy, often abbreviated RT, RTx, or XRT, is a therapy using ionizing radiation, generally as part of cancer treatment to control or kill malignant cells and normally delivered by a linear accelerator. Radiation therapy may be curative in a number of types of cancer if they are localized to one area of the body. It may also be used as part of adjuvant therapy, to prevent tumor recurrence after surgery to remove a primary malignant tumor (for example, early stages of breast cancer). Radiation therapy is synergistic with chemotherapy, and has been used before, during, and after chemotherapy in susceptible cancers. The subspecialty of oncology concerned with radiotherapy is called radiation oncology.

At present, radiotherapy is an interdisciplinary field employing an advanced therapeutic and imaging apparatus and computerized therapy planning and simulation systems. This means that both the patient-related aspects (diagnosis, selection, treatment indication, justification, referral, planning, therapy, follow-up) and the control and measurement procedures, forming the technical part of the treatment process, should be subject to regular planning, verification and, most importantly, constant improvement. While as of late, quality assurance in radiotherapy has been believed to play a key role in ensuring safe and effective treatment in the physical and technical context (efficient equipment, in vivo dosimetry, portal imaging), now a more systemic approach to quality is beginning to prevail. This, however, calls for designing, implementing, maintaining and improving formalized quality systems or, in other words, implementing versatile quality management systems to cover all areas of activity (administrative, organizational, physical, technical and clinical) of a health care institution applying ionizing radiation for medical purposes.

Radiophysics (also modern writing "Radio Physics") is a branch of physics focused on the theoretical and experimental study of certain kinds of radiation: its emission, propagation, and interaction with matter.

External beam radiation therapy (EBRT) directs a beam of radiation from outside the body at cancerous tissues inside the body. It is a cancer treatment option that uses doses of radiation to destroy cancerous cells and shrink tumors. Examples of EBRT include 3D conformal radiation therapy, IMRT, IGRT, TomoTherapy and stereotactic radiosurgery.

Internal radiation is also called brachytherapy. A radioactive implant is put inside the body in or near the tumor. Internal radiation therapy (brachytherapy) allows a higher dose of radiation in a smaller area than might be possible with external radiation treatment. It uses a radiation source that’s usually sealed in a small holder called an implant. Different types of implants may be called pellets, seeds, ribbons, wires, needles, capsules, balloons, or tubes. 

The standard localized therapies for cancer include external-beam radiation therapy, brachytherapy. There are several novel approaches in development aimed at improving local disease control and survival, and reducing post-treatment complications. In low-to-intermediate-risk patients, new radiation approaches are being explored to include hypofractionated robotic radiation therapy. For high-risk patients, the focus is on multimodality approaches, especially the addition of chemotherapy.

Many protocol studies are conducted in which patients are assigned to alternative treatment regimens. Typically the dosimetric specifications will define the maximal and minimal target doses and maximal doses to specify critical normal structures, and the success of the study will depend upon the consistency and reliability with which these dose specifications are applied. A dose prescription is prepared that defines upper and lower target doses as well as normal tissue dose tolerance levels for all organs of interest. This technique can be used during treatment planning to prevent protocol violations of pre-defined severity, or for retroactive correlation of local tumor recurrence and treatment-related morbidity with dose levels in the target and normal tissues. 

A Radiopharmaceutical is a drug that can be used either for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes. It is composed of a radioisotope bond to an organic molecule. The organic molecule conveys the radioisotope to specific organs, tissues or cells. The radioisotope is selected for its properties.

Radioactive waste is a waste product containing radioactive decay material. It is usually the product of a nuclear process such as nuclear fission, though industries not directly connected to the nuclear power industry may also produce radioactive waste. The main approaches to managing radioactive waste to date have been segregation and storage of short-lived wastes, near-surface disposal of low and some intermediate level wastes, and deep burial or transmutation for the long-lived, high-level wastes.

Radiation dosimetry in the fields of health physics and radiation protection is the measurement, calculation and assessment of the ionizing radiation dose absorbed by the human body. This applies both internally, due to ingested or inhaled radioactive substances, or externally due to irradiation by sources of radiation.

Radiobiology (also known as radiation biology) is a field of clinical and basic medical sciences that involves the study of the action of ionizing radiation on living things, especially health effects of radiation. Ionizing radiation is generally harmful and potentially lethal to living things but can have health benefits in radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer and thyrotoxicosis. Its most common impact is the induction of cancer with a latent period of years or decades after exposure. High doses can cause visually dramatic radiation burns, and/or rapid fatality through acute radiation syndrome. Controlled doses are used for medical imaging and radiotherapy.

About the basic health system and human resource knowledge. This topic will include characteristics of Health Care System, insurance, health care access, reimbursement in radiation therapy, and applicable human resource topics.