
Giacinto Scoles
Research Focus
During the last ten years, I have shifted the center of my scientific activity towards the important and interesting questions that are now emerging in the fields of biology and medicine. I am trying to bring my contribution to these research areas with the tools and the method of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology without losing sight of the need for a quantitative treatment and the use of theory and molecular simulations so that our contribution could be distinguished from those equally important but of a less general nature that can be obtained through the classic methods of molecular biology. The focus and the goal of our research is likely to be for the next 5 years the quantitative, high throughput, measurement of proteins and their interactions (Interactomics) in samples produced by a very small number of cells or within single cells. By means of this type of measurements we hope to make new inroads into quantitative diagnostics and disease monitoring. A second interest is the study (using the same methods and techniques) of stem cells especially in human organs, like the heart, where until relatively recently their presence had escaped detection by standard methods. Finally, we have recently entered the field of drug discovery where we hope to apply a new method that we call of the "earphones". In this method we make use of the tremendous advances made recently by computational theory in calculating and optimizing in a reliable way the interactions between small peptides and structured and unstructured biomolecules -- enzymes, in particular. Briefly we plan to tether a "drug" molecule with a linker to an oligo-pepetide that is designed to (and indeed does) bind to the back of the enzyme. The increased effective concentration of the "drug" will then ensure its binding to the active site of the enzyme. These new but "digestable" drugs will unlikely to be toxic, but in order to cross the cell membrane unchanged and ready to do their job, they will need to be delivered via targeted nanovectors.


