Technology

Photoswitchable peptides

Our drug candidates are peptidic therapeutics, modified by photoisomerizable building blocks. They can toggle between two forms, inactive and active, upon irradiation with light of different wavelength. The inactive (and non-toxic) photoswitchable peptidic drugs are administered to the patients. Switching the biological activity “on” with non-thermal red light irradiation in the sites of lesions (tumors, wounds) allows avoiding side-effects in the healthy tissues.

Publications

Diarylethene-Based Photoswitchable Inhibitors of Serine Proteases

16.07.2021

Oleg Babii, Sergii Afonin, Christian Diel, Marcel Huhn, Jennifer Dommermuth, Tim Schober, Serhii Koniev, Andrii Hrebonkin, Alexander Nesterov-Mueller, Igor V. Komarov, Anne S. Ulrich.
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2021, 60:21789-21794, DOI 10.1002/anie.202108847

Peptide drugs for photopharmacology: how much of a safety advantage can be gained by photocontrol?

07.02.2020

Oleg Babii, Sergii Afonin, Tim Schober, Liudmyla V Garmanchuk, Liudmyla I Ostapchenko, Volodymyr Yurchenko, Sergey Zozulya, Oleksandr Tarasov, Iryna Pishel, Anne S Ulrich, Igor V Komarov.
Future Drug. Discov. 2020, DOI 10.4155/fdd-2019-0033

Controlling the uptake of diarylethene‐based cell‐penetrating peptides into cells using light.

04.05.2019

Tim Schober, Ilona Wehl, Sergii Afonin, Oleg Babii, Anna Iampolska, Ute Schepers, Igor V. Komarov, Anne S. Ulrich
ChemPhotoChem, 2019, 3:384-391, DOI: 10.1002/cptc.201900019

Structure−activity relationships of photoswitchable diarylethene-based β-hairpin peptides as membranolytic antimicrobial and anticancer agents.

19.11.2018

Oleg Babii, Sergii Afonin, Aleksandr Yu. Ishchenko, Tim Schober, Anatoliy O. Negelia, Ganna M. Tolstanova, Liudmyla V. Garmanchuk, Liudmyla I. Ostapchenko, Igor V. Komarov, Anne S. Ulrich.
J. Med. Chem., 2018, 61:10793–10813, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.8b01428

Efficiently photocontrollable or not? Biological activity of photoisomerizable diarylethenes.

06.04.2018

Igor V. Komarov, Sergii Afonin, Oleg Babii, Tim Schober, Anne S. Ulrich.
Chem. Eur. J., 2018, 24:11245–11254, DOI: 10.1002/chem.201801205