Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) are chronic, life-altering conditions with the average age of diagnosis at the early age of 21. Through collaborative research in the Ghosh lab (UCSD School of Medicine) and Yang lab (UCSD Chemistry & Biochemistry), it has been shown that targeting two isoforms of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor (PPARα and PPARγ) can alleviate IBD in cell and mouse-model based assays. Using Boolean implication networks to analyze gene clusters, the continuum states of IBD-related diseases were more easily differentiated between disease and healthy states of patients. The genes PPARA and PPARG from these gene clusters were identified as suitable druggable targets. My approach is to design and synthesize novel PPARα/γ dual agonists which are balanced in activity, based on the only known balanced dual agonist in the literature currently, PAR5359. This will involve computational modeling experiments to design the molecules, synthetic organic chemistry, as well as in vitro binding assays to test the binding of novel molecules, in order to validate in silico docking experiments.

The video of this presentation is available here.