Oleg Sitsel awarded a 2-year EMBO Long Term Fellowship
Research assistant and former PhD student Oleg Sitsel from Poul Nissen’s and Keisuke Yonehara’s research groups has been awarded a 2-year EMBO Long Term Fellowship to study drug transporters from the solute carrier family of membrane proteins, which play a particularly prominent role in distributing drugs across the body. Oleg Sitsel will use the fellowship for a post-doctoral visit and conduct his research in Simon Newstead’s laboratory at the University of Oxford.
The background for receiving this fellowship is that a significant fraction of the vast resources invested by the pharmaceutical and academic research communities into developing new drugs is spent on investigating compounds that do not enter the market. The reasons are due to unsatisfactory efficacy, safety or pharmacokinetics - properties largely determined by how efficiently the candidate drugs reach their cellular targets. Studying the body's molecular mechanisms of drug uptake, translocation and excretion will help us predict drug candidates that will perform poorly in vivo and thereby cut drug development costs.