The team has a long experience in the medicinal chemistry field (synthesis, structural characterization, and structure-activity relationship studies of potentially bioactive molecules) as well as in the identification and isolation of natural compounds and secondary metabolites from plant extracts. The high inter-disciplinary approach is aimed to the identification and optimization of new molecules able to interact with new targets, focusing on therapeutic applications. The team has also a solid experience in the preparation and characterization of enantiopure compounds.
The research group has access to a fully equipped laboratory with all the facilities and instrumentation to perform organic synthesis on bench scale and for scale-up synthesis (tens-gram scale), as well as for the extraction of secondary metabolites from natural sources, under the most modern standards of production and rapid purification systems (i.e., standard and in parallel synthesis, peptide- synthesis, microwave assisted chemistry, flow chemistry). It possesses two microwave reactors – one dedicated to organic synthesis (CEM Discovery) and one for microwave-assisted extraction (CEM MARSX) – and a FT-IR spectrometer. The laboratory is also equipped with two analytical/semi-preparative HPLCs coupled with Photo Diode Array (PDA) and circular dichroism detectors, several stationary phases (both chiral and achiral) and a polarimeter equipped with Na and Hg lamps. The laboratory is also equipped with hardware and software dedicated to molecular modelling studies.
The research group also benefits from the scientific and technical expertise and services provided by the The LabMedChem will also benefit of the scientific and technical expertise, and services provided by the CGS (Centro Grandi Strumenti) which offer the latest in high-tech instruments for the structural determination and analysis of the synthesized new chemical entities. which offers up-to-date high-tech instruments for the structural determination and analysis of the synthesized new chemical entities. This includes high field NMR (Bruker 400), GC and HPLC Mass spectrometry (e.g., GC/MS CombiPAL /Thermo Scientific DSQ II Single Quadrupole, GC/MS Thermo Scientific DSQ II Single Quadrupole, LC/MS Thermo Scientific LCQ Fleet Ion Trap, GC-MS/MS TSQ QUANTUM Thermo Scientific), Primary protein structure sequencer (G1000A) and X-ray diffractometer (ENRAF-NONIUS CAD4).