Adam Renslo, PhD

Phone: +1 415 514-9698
600 16th St, Rm N572B
UCSF Box 2280
San Francisco, CA 94158
United States

What I do

I am the School’s representative in collaborations between our academic scientists and industry, aiming to translate the most promising discoveries and technologies from our research into therapies that reach patients.

My research group is engaged at the interface of chemistry and biology. As medicinal chemists, we design and synthesize small molecules that modulate disease pathology at the level of the enzyme, cell, and whole animal, with current projects in cancer, infectious disease, and neurodegeneration. As chemical biologists, we employ novel small molecule probes to better understand biological pathways and the mechanisms of small molecule therapeutics.

Departmental research area

My research expertise

targeted drug-delivery, understanding and improving the cell permeability of peptide therapeutics, fragment-based drug discovery, identifying and characterizing the targets of novel small molecules

Professional background

Biography

My research group is engaged at the interface of chemistry and biology. As medicinal chemists, we design and synthesize small molecules that modulate disease pathology at the level of the enzyme, cell, and whole animal, with active projects in cancer, infectious disease, and neurodegeneration. Our group also developed a parallel synthetic methodology to produce a library of disulfide 'fragments', thereby enabling cysteine-disulfide (Tethering) screening at UCSF. Finally, we design, synthesize and validate novel small molecule probes for the study of labile ferrous iron in biology and disease. Most recently, we described the first of a new class of activity-based probes for proximity labelling of proteins in an iron-dependent fashion, thus enabling the first chemoproteomic studies of the labile iron 'interactome'.

Research keywords

  • Antimalarials
  • caspases
  • Caspase 6
  • Iron
  • Anti-Bacterial Agents
  • Heterocyclic Compounds, 1-Ring
  • Spiro Compounds
  • Oxazolidinones
  • Prion Diseases
  • Trypanocidal Agents
  • Protease Inhibitors
  • Peroxides
  • Ferrous Compounds
  • Structure-Activity Relationship
  • Preclinical Drug Evaluation