Guoxuan Sun

Background

About Guoxuan Sun

A PhD majoring drug discovery in UCL school of pharmacy. My project aims to develop a Novobiocin based anti-cancer drug candidate, targetting human Heat shock protein 90. I am skilled in chemical synthesis, protein target validation and HPLC. Have experience in structural biology, proteomics analysis, mass spec analysis, protein biology and analytical chemistry. I prefer any (chemical/drug discovery/ cancer biology/ gene technology) research-based job or post-doctoral position. I am very enthusiastic about research and good at solving problems independently. I am also a very open-minded researcher who will not be limited by my research area. In my PhD project, I designed a novobiocin based covalent drug that showed 3-4 fold better antiproliferative activity. To validate the covalent modification towards the drug target Hsp90 C-terminus, I studied the result using native page gel, MST and proteomics analysis. I successfully find my ligand binds to C597/C598 of Hsp90 C-terminus, validated the covalent modification of my covalent drug candidate. I also find few promising analogues and added into SAR of Hsp90 C-terminus inhibitors. Also, my research found that glycosylation of a lead structure may enhance its drug selectivity among different types of cancer. For example, while glucosyl-novobiocin showed preferable selectivity against breast cancer, galactosyl-novobiocin is more effective against pancreas cancer. This is due to pancreas cancer cell line metabolize galactose more effectively than breast cancer, as a result, galactose moiety assembled to the lead structure may beneficial to cancer cell line selectivity.