Dr. Steve Sucheck, University of Toledo

Host: Dr. Anderson

Antibiotic drug resistance is an emerging global health treat. At the same time, there has been lag in the discovery of new medicines to treat these emergent drug resistant pathogens. Innovative approaches are needed to address this problem. Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the bacteria that causes Tuberculosis (TB). TB was responsible for 1.5 million deaths in 2020 alone. We have focused on the modification of naturally occurring carbohydrate-based substrates which target enzymes within the trehalose utilization pathways of Mtb as a potential source of new drug leads. More recently we have also expanded into the synthesis of traditional small molecules and natural product derivatives active against drug resistant, replicating, or dormant Mtb. Some of these compounds have found use as enzyme probes in structural biology studies which have informed next-generation inhibitor designs. A second area of interest has been the synthesis of a ‘synthetic’ vaccine platform with improved immunological performance. We have utilized carbohydrates which have been found to act as antibody recruiting molecules to target Fcg receptors on antigen presenting cells in order to achieve enhancement in T-cell priming and antigen cross-presentation. We have combined this targeting mechanism with synthetic glycopeptide-based antigens that are under investigation as either components of anticancer vaccines or antibacterial agents. We will describe our efforts to synthesize and evaluate these vaccines as well as our latest efforts to develop a P. aeruginosa vaccine based on a hybrid of synthetic and molecular biology methods.

Professor Steven Sucheck, Ph.D. graduated from the University of Virginia with a Ph.D. in 1998 under Professor Sidney M. Hecht and completed postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute with Professor Chi-Huey Wong, He was a Group Leader at Optimer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and later joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Toledo in 2005. His group designs new antibiotics and vaccines to treat infectious disease and cancer.