Niranjan Thota

Short presentation

I am an enthusiastic and self-driven researcher, with an organized work style, and having more than 10 years of doctoral and postdoctoral research experience in Synthetic/Medicinal chemistry, Peptide chemistry and Carbohydrate synthesis. My present research is EU-IMI-ENABLE project. In this project, we have been working on designing & synthesis of small molecules library of Metallo-β-lactamase (MBL) inhibitors.

My research efforts have principally focused on medicinal chemistry where my most significant work related to the synthesis of potentiators of antimicrobial drugs, during this project I designed and synthesized 200 molecules library of bacterial multidrug efflux pump inhibitors. This library was then screened for inhibition of the NorA efflux pump using ethidium bromide as a standard substrate for NorA in S.aureus wild-type and 1199B (NorA-overexpressing, ciprofloxacin-resistant). Approximately 50 compounds were found to be positive in the preliminary screening. Significantly, several of these new compounds were found to be 32-64 fold more potent than known efflux pump inhibitors such as Reserpine, Verapamil, Piperine and Carsonic acid showing ED₅₀ of  ≤ 6.25 µg/mL.

My recent post-doctoral research at KTH-Stockholm has also been in the applied medicinal chemistry arena where I developed syntheses of Oligomannan epitopes for nanoparticle functionalization and Cyanovirin-N binding evaluation.

In addition to the above, during my postdoctoral research at IIT-Bombay, India we developed a novel method for the synthesis of Modified Phenylalanine Peptides by Cross Enyne Metathesis and a Diels–Alder Reaction as Key Steps and Diversity-Oriented Approach to Triazole Based Peptidomimetics as Mammalian Sterile 20 Kinase Inhibitors.

I have one-year Contract Research Organisation (CRO) industrial experience as Manager where I synthesised several Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) molecules and their impurities.