Peter Blanco Carcache

Background

About Peter Blanco Carcache

During my graduate studies, I was part of teaching various Pharmaceutical Sciences courses at either the level of PharmD or undergrad with class sizes of up to 150. As a teaching assistant, I developed my skills in content design, teaching recitation, exam proctoring, grading, office hours, and attending lectures. Teaching both student levels helped me apply different pedagogy for the benefit of the student and polish my problem-solving skills. Also, as a senior member in labs, I applied my prior teaching experience in mentoring junior members of the lab in various aspects of laboratory science and management such as techniques, data and inventory management, and safety regulations amongst others. Additionally, I have guided students, staff, and faculty in the preparation and management of Standard Operating Procedures for lab scientific protocols and techniques. Research during my graduate studies focused on Natural Product Drug Discovery to extract, purify, identify, and evaluate the effectiveness of significantly active compounds from selected natural products. The process can be applied to different sample sources such as small molecule, proteins, and even RNA. Briefly, various physical and wet laboratory analysis techniques such as HPLC, UV-Vis, optical rotation, Circular Dichroism, FTIR, NMR, Mass Spectrometry (MS), and more were used to purify, characterize, or elucidate active compounds from semi-purified crude mixtures, with identification and isolation of contaminants found in a promising sample. In silico techniques and biological assays were applied for compound screening and analysis of mechanisms of action. As a Post-Doctoral Scholar, I further developed skills in natural product chemistry and biology by applying synthesis/derivatization and Molecular Biology techniques. I learned techniques for RNA nanoparticle theory, synthesis, assembly, and RNA nanoparticle conjugation of natural product derived small molecule and protein. These nanoparticles were used in vivo as potential anticancer drugs with targeted drug delivery. Furthermore, I found new natural ligands and modified their chemical structures to optimize structure for nanoparticles attachment to improve delivery and decrease toxicity. Recently, a patent was filed on one of the nanochemicals. Another project I worked on was on Native RNA/DNA protein-complex purification and identification of multimers via Ultracentrifugation, fluorescence PAGE visualization, and LC-MS analysis to study the mechanism RNA/DNA-protein interactions to discover a new application as a drug delivery system.